


if you love me, come clean

by freefallvertigo



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Hanahaki Disease, Hurt/Comfort, Love Confessions, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Pining, Whump, i'm really putting yaz through it here, of course im writing a hanahaki fic yall know im an angst whore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:35:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 27,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27177958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freefallvertigo/pseuds/freefallvertigo
Summary: Really, though — it was never going to be anything else, was it?It was never going to be anything but a petal: bright yellow and speckled with dark blood. Yaz is holding a death sentence in her hand, and all she can think is that it was always going to end like this. One way or another, not having the Doctor was always going to kill her.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Comments: 34
Kudos: 144





	1. ray florets

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for those of you who might not be aware, hanahaki disease is a trope wherein a person who believes that their love is unrequited starts to grow flowers in their lungs, which will eventually kill them if it isn’t reciprocated. just as a warning, i will be describing these symptoms in detail, and it's probably not gonna be very pleasant if you're squeamish. anyway, enjoy the pain. hopefully part two won't take too long!

They love you, they love you not. 

A mantra. A game. Tear the petals from the flower and let mother nature decide your fate. But do be careful — mother nature, she can be so cruel. If you’re going to play with her, keep in mind that she doesn’t always play fair. She doesn’t always play sweet. Her sodden soil is steeped in blood, she picks her teeth with lovers’ bones, and sometimes a flower blooms crimson when it shouldn’t. Sometimes a garden is not a garden, but a set of lungs instead. 

Yasmin Khan learns this the hard way. 

It’s not her fault. It’s never their fault. Hearts blossom when they find the light that nourishes and the laughter that slips, like water, through their ribs. 

The Doctor was a sun even on that first day: fizzing with regeneration energy, dancing with death, assuming control like it was her crown to inherit. And, oh, she wore it well. None suited that throne so fine. A just conqueror Yaz would willingly kneel before, for one purpose or another. But then — she eventually supposes in hindsight — that was her fair warning. Her first breath of spring. 

She should have run while she had the chance. 

As it happens, none can outrun the changing of the seasons. Not forever. Not when they’ve been trapped in a bleak and endless winter for so long and only crave a little warmth, a little hope; a seed she’ll be sorry to sow.

Early onset, Yaz misses the signs. Most tell of a lingering taste on the tongue: fragrant and floral. They say there’s a perfume that follows them from room to room, one they alone can smell. For some, it’s roses (unfortunate souls. Their last days are filled with agony; failing organs torn to shreds with microscopic thorns — mother nature’s fangs). For others, it’s jasmine, magnolia, honeysuckle, peony, sweet alyssum, hyacinth.

Because the flower, you see, is particular. Not to the lover but to the loved. It’s a symbol. It’s a poem, an ode; a cosmic joke. The person you love is a daisy, and now your delightful daisy is going to choke you to death. 

This game gets crueller by the second. 

Yaz never catches a whiff of any such sickly-sweet aromatics. In fact, all she ever smells is a distinct earthiness. A freshness in her nostrils, something that brings to mind verdant hills and endless, frolicing fields. It’s always strongest around the Doctor. Naturally, she designates it the Doctor’s signature scent; decides that it’s just her perpetual air of adventure, the wind in her coat; the mud caking her boots. It's not something she ever feels the need to mention. It’s something that just is. 

The Doctor smells like life itself — and what? 

Stranger things occur daily. 

Yaz diagnoses her feelings long before she diagnoses her associated affliction. They’re sharing a motel bed in the stuffy heat of Alabama, 1955. They haven’t known each other long. Crushes don’t care. Crushes don’t need long to develop. If you’re lucky, they take even less to leave you well enough alone. She doesn’t know it yet, but Yaz isn’t one of the lucky ones, though it’s hard to believe that when she’s lying shoulder to shoulder with a woman she’s fast beginning to think is the best person she’s ever met. 

She wonders if there’s a lot of pollen in the air, because she swears she can almost taste it on her tongue when she rolls onto her side to find the Doctor already gazing at her. Her eyes shine even in the dark. 

“Doctor?” whispers Yaz, hoping to avoid waking Ryan and a loudly snoring Graham. 

“Sorry,” mumbles the Doctor, blinking her way back to the room. “Was I starin’? Kinda got lost in my head for a minute. Lots to think about, don’t mind me.”

“Can’t you sleep?”

“Actually not all that tired. Don’t get tired much, not like you lot.” The Doctors drums her fingers against the pillow in deliberation. “Might go for a walk. Fresh air, an’ all that.” She sits up. The second she does, Yaz reaches out, closing her fingers loosely around her wrist. 

They both look at her hand. 

“Mind if I join?”

Never has Yaz known a smile so warm. So much like an invitation. “Always.”

The night is humid, the stars bright. They stick mostly to the shadows for fear of attracting unwanted attention, veering away from lampposts and glowing shop windows. Though the air between them is amiable, the Doctor’s head is ducked and her hands are buried in her pockets as they walk. 

Yaz nudges her arm. “Look a bit down. Everythin’ all right?”

“Yeah, ‘course,” says the Doctor, but she sounds more subdued than usual. 

“Worried about Rosa?”

“Hard not to be. There’s loads that could go wrong tomorrow. This is a pivotal moment in humanity’s history and it’s down to the lot of us to protect it. If we put one foot wrong…” Sighing, the Doctor comes to a stop. They’ve wandered just past the outskirts of town and onto a stretch of highway, where a billboard advertising cigarettes vies for the attention, and health, of midnight passengers. “But it’s not just history I’m worried about.”

Before Yaz can ask for an elaboration, the Doctor attaches herself to the rungs of the rusted ladder leading up to the billboard and begins to climb.

“Um. Doctor?”

“What? You managed a crane all right. C’mon!”

Following a clandestine glance over her shoulder, Yaz follows the Doctor up the ladder and onto the billboard’s ledge, accepting the hand that shoots out to pull her the rest of the way. They sit down, legs swinging over the edge and backs pressed to the vinyl.

“Always find it helps to shift your perspective a little, don’t you?” muses the Doctor. She’s looking back the way they came, at the sleeping town shrouded by night. 

None of them know what’s coming, Yaz thinks. The people down there, they won’t even know what’s been until it’s long passed. History in the making and, for most, it’ll be just another Thursday. But that’s usually the way of things, isn’t it? Big moments don’t seem like big moments until you look back on them. Until you’re watching them pass you by. Yaz eyes the Doctor. She wonders if two people sitting on a billboard might one day qualify. 

“So what else are you worried about?” asks Yaz, picking up where the Doctor abruptly left off. 

“Isn’t it obvious, Yaz? I’m worried about you.” The Doctor’s hand holds onto the ledge right beside Yaz’s. There can’t be more than a centimetre between them. “I promised I’d get you home safe. All of you. Need to make sure I don’t break that promise.”

Yaz chews her lip. Beneath them, a car drives by. “I trust you,” she says. Like it’s nothing. 

But then she looks at the Doctor and the Doctor is looking at her like it’s definitely not nothing. “You wouldn’t be the first.”

It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t seem like it should be so sad. And yet, when the Doctor utters it and casts her eyes towards the sky, it breaks Yaz’s heart. She wishes she knew why. Following her gaze, Yaz finds a fingernail moon hanging over the distant buildings. 

“I kinda thought I’d be more afraid than this,” Yaz confesses. 

“You probably should be.”

“It’s hard when I’m with you.”

“Yeah,” the Doctor agrees grimly. “I know.”

Yaz turns to her. “That’s not a bad thing, Doctor. You make people brave.”

“You were already brave.”

“How do you know?”

“I can tell. I can always tell.” The Doctor levels Yaz with a moonlit stare. Yaz’s own falters over her mouth. It’s a nice mouth. She wonders if aliens taste different; yearns to sate her curiosity. It isn’t until her lips are moving again that Yaz thinks to stop watching them. “The brave ones worry me most.”

Yaz tries to reel in that faraway undercurrent to the Doctor’s voice; the distance that possesses her so frequently. “I think you worry too much.”

“You would too, if you’d lost what I have.” 

_Do you have a family?_

_Lost them a long time ago._

The air between them is fraught with the thousand things the Doctor says with her silence. “Do you ever get lonely?” 

“Haven’t had much time for that lately. Haven’t stopped moving since…” she trails off. The start to another story Yaz will never know the ending of. 

Yaz thinks about the TARDIS. Vast and impossible. She thinks how quiet it must be when there’s no one around but the Doctor. How does she fill all that space; all that emptiness? Or does it climb inside of her instead? 

“I get lonely sometimes,” reveals Yaz, frowning at her feet. “More than sometimes. Occasionally I think everyone in the world’s just putting on an act. That we’re all as miserable as each other and life’s just a game of who can pretend better. I dunno if that makes me feel better or worse.”

The Doctor’s little finger bumps against Yaz’s. “Loneliness isn’t forever, Yaz. I promise.”

Under cover of night, Yaz dares to edge her own pinky closer until it’s draped across the Doctor’s. Neither of them acknowledge the touching of hands. “It’s like you said though: we’ve not stopped lately and I haven’t felt like that once. It’s like I’m someone else around you. Someone I can stand to be around.”

“Oh,” says the Doctor. It looks like she doesn’t know what else to say. In lieu of a better response, she shifts her hand another few centimetres and Yaz does the same. They’re both intently watching the stars as fingers brush together and slot between the ridges of cool knuckles. The Doctor clears her throat. “Y’know, I’m glad I found you when I did. The lot of you, I mean. Think you’re exactly what I needed.”

“I think you’re exactly what I needed, too,” Yaz replies without missing a beat. “Do you think… I mean, I dunno if you believe in that stuff, but do you reckon there’s a chance it wasn’t an accident?”

“You’re talkin’ about fate?”

“S’pose I am.”

“Fate’s got nothin’ to do with it,” the Doctor states, matter-of-fact. Yaz languishes. “But the universe is an old friend of mine. I think, now and again, she gives me a little nudge in the right direction. A shove, if I’m feelin’ particularly stubborn. Which is often.”

“And if not the universe, then your TARDIS,” quips Yaz. She pauses. “You speak about it — about _her_ — like she’s alive.”

“What makes y’think she isn’t?”

Yaz deliberates. After all they’ve seen so far, can she really dismiss anything as impossible? “It’s almost like she doesn’t want us to leave. All these wrong landings, it’s like a message.” Not as delicate a hint as Yaz was shooting for. Not as subtle a plea for more. 

The Doctor opens her mouth as if to speak, only to think better of it and offer a weak smile instead. 

Yaz’s hopes deflate like old balloons. “Guess it’s home after all this then.”

“Yeah. Guess so.”

Desperately clutching for an inch of rope, Yaz tries again. One last shot in the dark. “I almost don’t wanna leave.”

She misfires. Whether naive or wilfully ignorant, the Doctor doesn’t take Yaz’s bait, low though it hangs. “Well, you aren’t goin’ anywhere right this second, are you? We’ve got tonight.”

“Doctor—“

Whatever Yaz is on the cusp of voicing disintegrates halfway up her throat when the Doctor turns her palm over and weaves their fingers together. Yaz’s lips are still parted around words unspoken, mutely regarding their interlocked hands. They look good together. Yaz doesn’t even think to ask herself if this is a deliberate ploy, on the Doctor’s part, to keep her from asking for that which she isn’t yet prepared to offer. She doesn’t think to wonder whether the Doctor has noticed the reverence with which Yaz regards her; whether she might be using the stars in her eyes for her own gain. 

Yaz doesn’t think the Doctor has it in her to be so malicious. 

Near perfect strangers, and Yaz is a fool for her already. But when the Doctor squeezes Yaz’s hand and shares with her a shy, whisper of a smile, she doesn’t feel a fool. Not even a little bit. 

“We’ve got tonight,” the Doctor reiterates, and tilts her head skyward. “And it’s a really lovely night. Know anythin’ about constellations?”

“Not much.”

“Were kinda hopin’ you’d say that. Lucky for you, Yasmin Khan, I’m a great teacher. See that scatterin’ of stars over there, above the treetops?” The Doctor points with their joined hands and Yaz’s insides are warm and soft and golden like butter. She does her best to listen to the Doctor unravel the secrets in the sky, but it’s hard not to get distracted by the press of cool skin to warm, by rough fingertips against smooth knuckles; by the way the Doctor’s thumb strokes the back of her hand as she enthuses about her favourite subject. 

The Doctor holds Yaz’s hand until the moon hovers just above the edge of the world and threatens to jump. 

The Doctor holds Yaz’s hand the whole walk back. 

The Doctor lets go of Yaz’s hand. 

She puts her to bed. 

Yaz dreams of entwined fingers, entwined limbs; entwined stems. She dreams she kisses the Doctor but they both have petals for lips. She dreams the Doctor is there, holding her hand at the end of the world, when all that remains is the fire warming their bones — and one, lonely flower sprouting from ruin and rubble. 

The moment she wakes, she forgets. The Doctor does not reach for her hand again. 

Yaz breathes the morning in.

And sneezes. 

Allergies, she supposes. She must have been right about that pollen.

* * *

Days with the Doctor turn to weeks. Weeks fast become months. A schoolgirl crush mutates into a limerence, an obsession; a dangerous hunger that fills her bones like marrow. It’s a transplant Yaz didn’t consent to, but sometimes she convinces herself it’s saving her life anyway. She’s wrong. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s so, tragically wrong. 

Yaz tries to be okay with knowing the Doctor doesn’t feel the same way. 

The way she smiles at her is enough. The way her laughter bounces endlessly between the walls of her skull, like an echo in a cave, is enough. The way they run side by side, the way they effortlessly catch one another’s eye across a room full of people, the way the Doctor shields Yaz with her whole body in the face of immediate threat — it’s enough. It has to be enough. 

She does her best to ignore how her skin itches, burns, screams for more and how her hand is forever holding the ghost of the Doctor’s. That night in Alabama proves itself a painful anomaly. The only time the Doctor takes her hand anymore is to drag her from A to B. To pull her away from, or towards, certain danger. 

But Yaz still thinks of her hands often. Deft, nimble fingers curl around the Sheffield steel of a sonic screwdriver and Yaz pictures them curling around her hips instead. If not her throat. 

When Yaz is alone, she closes her eyes and fancies she can imagine what the Doctor’s mouth feels like on her mouth, her neck; her naked body; the wanting valley between her thighs. Invisible fingers comb through Yaz’s hair and twist her limbs atop sweat-damp sheets. They rake across her back. They caress. They bruise. They push past her teeth and slide across her tongue. Yaz chokes on them. No, she really does. 

At least, she can’t think of any other way to explain the way her throat tickles and her lungs flutter. It must be the Doctor’s phantom hands. It must be Yaz’s imagination — it always has been a visceral beast. And she’s thankful for it. After all, it isn’t like she’ll ever get the real thing. 

When she comes with her hand down her trousers, Yaz tastes a green eden on her tongue; whimpers the Doctor’s name with a breath full of flora. 

She wants to keep dismissing it, that botanic flavour she can't quite seem to scrub from the back of her tongue and between her teeth. But it’s getting stronger. Has been for a while. And that dense, earthy smell follows her even to her tiny flat in Sheffield, when the Doctor is miles, and millennia, away. 

Yaz tries not to worry; it’s not like she’s in love. She can’t be in love.

Not with the Doctor. 

She has feelings for her, sure. Conscious or otherwise, her every living moment is devoted to dreaming about her. Smiling about her. Sighing about her. When their bodies scarcely brush together, even through the several layers of fabric between them, Yaz’s heart revs like a tricked out engine. But it’s just an infatuation. It’ll go away. It doesn’t have a choice, because Yaz absolutely, a thousand percent, _cannot_ fall for the Doctor. 

And she really believes she hasn’t. 

Until she chokes up her first petal. 

By the time it happens, she’s had a mild cough for a while. A discomfort in her chest. She calls it mild, but the truth is it’s been getting progressively harder to talk, move, breathe without erupting into another coughing fit. There are times when she thinks she’s got something stuck in her throat; when she thinks, if she could just get it out, she’d be able to breathe easy again. 

She’s only half right. 

It’s morning on the TARDIS. Or, it isn’t morning, but Yaz’s body clock says it is and hers is the most reliable of the lot. Her shower-damp hair is still drying when she pads down to the kitchen in a pair of joggers and an old college hoodie — rapping on Ryan and Graham’s doors on her way down. 

The kitchen is a bright, airy room that doesn’t look like it belongs on a spaceship. The walls are soft yellow, the marble island catches the light of the artificial sun — which pools in through the faux-window above the sink — and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee curls invisible tendrils around Yaz. The Doctor is already there. No sooner has Yaz breezed in through the archway than the Doctor turns, smiles sleepily, and slides Yaz’s mug across the counter towards her. 

Yaz raises a brow and hoists herself onto a stool at the island. “Did you just make this for me?”

“I did,” yawns the Doctor. She runs a hand through her hair and leans against the counter. “Had to ask the machine how you like it. Hope it’s all right.”

“You asked the coffee machine how I take my coffee?”

“It’s psychic.”

Yaz takes a sip and smiles to herself. It’s precisely how she takes it — just a dash of milk, half a teaspoon of sugar, and a drop of vanilla extract. “That coffee maker isn’t psychic, Doctor. I bought you that one. From Tesco.”

“Oh. Did you?” The Doctor rubs the back of her neck and shrugs, sheepish. “Dunno then.”

The Doctor noticed.

The Doctor noticed how Yaz takes her coffee, and had a fresh cup ready and waiting for her when she walked in. She didn’t even make herself a cup. Something scratches the back of Yaz’s throat and she coughs into her elbow. It doesn’t help. Whatever it is, it’s lodged. She ignores it. 

“Did you get much rest?” Yaz asks, eyeing the creases in the Doctor’s clothes. Her eyelids aren’t open all the way, suggesting she’s yet to rub the sands of sleep from her eyes. 

“Nodded off over the console again,” admits the Doctor. She pulls up the stool next to Yaz and rolls her neck with a sigh. “Not exactly a recipe for comfort.”

“Dunno how many times I’ve told you, you need to find a bed when you start getting tired,” Yaz scolds gently. “Bet your back’s killing.”

“Ah, I’m fine. Made of sturdy stuff, me,” brags the Doctor, but she winces when she leans forward to steeple her hands on top of the counter. “I’ll shake it off, don’t you worry. Healthy dose of adrenaline ought to do it.”

Yaz gives her a dubious look. “I know what’ll do it.”

“Pray tell.”

Setting her mug down, Yaz slides off her stool and comes to stand behind the Doctor. “What you need, mate, is a decent shoulder rub. Lucky for you, these hands are the best in Sheffield.”

“Ah, don’t sell yourself short, Yaz. I’m sure they’re the best in Yorkshire, at least.” The Doctor’s amused smile, Yaz notices, falters the second she slides her hands up the backs of her shoulders. She’s missing her coat, leaving only the thin material of her T-shirt in the way. Yaz wonders how the Doctor would react if she told her to take it off. 

She opts not to find out. 

Beginning with the muscles at either side of her neck, Yaz applies a lenient pressure and gradually increases it until she elicits a quiet sigh. The Doctor’s skin, as always, is noticeably colder than her own. But no less smooth. Only her hands are ever rough with the evidence of her labour. 

“Tilt your head down,” instructs Yaz. When the Doctor does as she’s told, Yaz rests one of her palms against her forehead to hold it in place. With her other hand, she massages the base of the Doctor’s skull and the back of her neck. She tries not to fret that the Doctor can feel how warm she’s suddenly running. If she couldn't before, she certainly must be able to when she makes a low groan and elevates the temperature of Yaz’s skin by several degrees. Yaz lifts her head back up and moves onto her shoulders. 

“Gods, y’really do have magic fingers,” lauds the Doctor. 

Yaz doesn’t know how to respond to that, so she doesn’t. Kneading the knots in the Doctor’s muscles until their tension slackens, she tries to bring her wandering mind to heel. Easier said than done. Because Yaz is touching the Doctor, and the Doctor is watching her closely in their reflection on the oven screen across the kitchen, and the room is silent. 

It’s not fair how the Doctor leans into her touch. It’s not fair how easy it would be for Yaz to duck her head and seek out the Doctor’s pulse with her tongue; help her unwind in a different way entirely. None of this is fair. The worst part is that she’s doing it to herself. 

She can’t help it. 

The Doctor just makes suffering seem infinitely sweeter. 

But Yaz is thinking too loud. Her hands still on the Doctor’s shoulders and their gazes lock onto one another in their translucent reflection. The air grows thick. Viscous. Yaz feels it crawling down her neck, thick as syrup. And it clings. Sticks to her throat and coats her lungs. 

She coughs. Just once. She coughs, and it catapults the Doctor back to her senses. Shrugging Yaz’s hands off her shoulders, she springs to her feet and is quick to put several strides between them. 

“Much better already. Thanks Yaz!” she exclaims, rolling her shoulders and refusing to meet Yaz’s eye. Instead, she picks up the coffee pot and pours herself a mug. “That were ace. Really set me up for the day. You good for coffee? Got tonnes here.”

“My mug’s still full,” Yaz croaks hoarsely. She coughs again. Lifts a hand to her throat. Something’s _there_. She’s positive. 

“Ah, well, more if you need it.” The Doctor flashes a grin that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Anyway, better be off. Bit of tinkerin’ to do before we kick off our adventurin’ for the day. How’s the intergalactic Olympics sound?”

“Um—“ Cough. “I think—“

“It’s wicked, trust me. Ever seen anyone use their own limb as a javelin before? Ha. You’re about to! See ya down there, eh?” With that, the Doctor claps Yaz’s shoulder and glides out of the room. 

Yaz is still rubbing her neck when she watches the Doctor leave. The second she disappears entirely from view, that _something_ lodged in Yaz’s airway moves just so. Reflexively, she begins to sputter around it. She chokes. It keeps moving. She keeps coughing. Eyes watering, Yaz reaches blindly for the sink and doubles over it, retching nothing into the basin. But that foreign object is climbing her throat. It’s almost close enough to reach, close enough to taste. She’s coughing so hard her stomach hurts. A tear tracks down her cheek. Then, at long last, she feels something tickle her tongue. 

Yaz opens her mouth and forces her fingers to the back of it. They close around something soft and smooth and delicate and she gags as she pulls it out of her throat and into the unforgiving light of day. 

Bent over the sink, breathless and red-eyed, Yaz stares at the treasure unearthed from her insides. She stares and she stares and she can’t stop staring even when realisation sinks to the base of her stomach like a stone. A grave. A slab of rock with her name carved onto the surface. 

Really, though — it was never going to be anything else, was it? 

It was never going to be anything but a petal: bright yellow and speckled with dark blood. Yaz is holding a death sentence in her hand, and all she can think is that it was always going to end like this. One way or another, not having the Doctor was always going to kill her. She accepts that now. Straightening up, Yaz wipes her tears and holds the petal up to the light. Its yellow pigment catches the rays and drips golden honey and she knows, in an instant, which flowers bloom in her lungs at the behest of her wretched love. 

Sunflowers, of course. 

What else?

* * *

Yaz doesn’t remember much of what happened that day. She spent it someplace far away. Her body, she figures, attended the Olympics. But she wasn’t really there. There was nobody behind her eyes. 

When they return to the TARDIS, Yaz trudges up to her room without so much as a word. She collapses onto her bed and twirls the petal she hid in her top drawer between her fingers. It looks sad and brittle. It looks how she feels. 

Yasmin Khan is dying. 

It’s a fact she repeats to herself, over and over again, in an effort to make it seem less absurd. None of this feels real. It’s like it’s happening to somebody else and she’s just watching from the outside. But no. Yasmin Khan is dying and the diagnosis is the Doctor. That’s not very accurate though, is it? The Doctor didn’t do this to her. The Doctor didn’t ask for Yaz’s heart — who would? It’s such a pitiful thing. She wishes she could carve it out of her chest and lunge it into a black hole. She wishes somebody would come at her with a pair of shears and rip out the garden growing inside of her. 

Not once does she wish she never met the Doctor. That’s something she’d never sacrifice — even if it saved her life. 

There’s a knock at Yaz’s bedroom door. 

Crushing the petal into nothing with her hand, Yaz sits up. “Come in.”

The door opens part way and the Doctor’s blonde head pokes around it. When she spots Yaz, her features soften and she steps into the room. Yaz suppresses a cough. 

“Hiya, Yaz. Just wanted to check in,” smiles the Doctor. She points to the end of Yaz’s bed with a question in her eyes and Yaz nods. The mattress dips when the Doctor sits down. “Ran off so fast earlier y’practically left a cloud of dust in your wake.”

“Sorry about that. Just tired, I guess,” lies Yaz. She knows she won’t be sleeping a wink tonight. 

The Doctor nods. “Right. Only, you’ve been a bit distant all day. Hardly said a word. Didn’t eat anythin’. Didn’t even laugh at any of my jokes, which is when y’really know something’s up.”

Yaz looks down at her fidgeting hands. Over the duvet, the Doctor rests a hand on her calf and Yaz really wishes she wouldn’t do that. She reaches for the glass of water on her nightstand and takes a long drink in the hopes of keeping any telltale petals at bay. 

“I know you’ve had a bit of a cough,” the Doctor goes on. “If you’re feelin’ under the weather, y’should let me take a look.”

“No,” Yaz asserts. Far too hasty. The Doctor frowns. “I mean, it’s just a cough. Honestly. It’ll go away on its own.” Technically, Yaz isn’t lying. The cough will go away on its own, but it’ll also take her with it. The thought almost makes Yaz laugh. She can’t fathom why, but she tells herself it’s good to hold onto her sense of humour. Dark thought it may be. 

Yaz muses how odd it is that she’s holding back laughter when she hasn’t even cried yet. Shock, in all likelihood. Denial. 

It’ll pass. 

“Can I ask you something, Doctor?”

“Anything.”

Yaz bites the inside of her cheek. What she wants to ask is, _why don’t you love me_? What she wants to ask is, _how long do I have_? What she wants to ask is, _was there anything I could have done to make you see me the way I see you, or was this hopeless from the start_? 

What she asks instead is, “What do you know about sunflowers?”

“Oh. Um.” The Doctor’s surprise is clear. She leans back and her hand slips from Yaz’s leg. Yaz misses it when it’s gone. _Will she miss me when I’m gone_? “Quite a bit, I guess. What exactly d’you wanna know?”

“All of it. Everything.”

“Okay,” the Doctor drawls with a furrowed brow, perplexed at the hard left the conversation is taking. She scratches her ear and considers. “Well, most people know that sunflowers, in their infancy, are always facing the sun. If you’ve a flat field of sunflowers with a clear view of the horizon, they’ll all be turned towards the east as the sun rises. By the time it’s setting, they’ll all be facing west. Heliotropism. Remarkable feat of nature.”

Yaz did know that. 

It makes sense, really. Just as a sunflower is forever facing the nearest sun, as is the Doctor perpetually turned towards the stars. A million, billion suns for her to warm her cheeks on and alight her eyes in the orbit of. Whatever the Doctor’s past, however dark it may be, she is eternally chasing the light. Looking towards hope, towards a better future; towards a brand new day and all it has to offer. 

“But did you also know,” the Doctor continues, “that a sunflower isn’t actually just a single flower?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, y’know those petals that look like rays of sunshine? They’re not actually petals! They’re what’s called ray florets — basically flowers themselves. And the bits in the middle of the flower head, the blooms, they’re flowers too. Thousands of ‘em!” the Doctor reveals like an excitable science teacher. “Sunflowers, Yasmin Khan, contain multitudes.”

As does the Doctor.

She, with her many past lives and all those thousands of years tucked under her belt. She who has loved and lost more than another living soul in this, or any, universe. She who endures. 

_The Doctor will survive this,_ Yaz assures herself. _She’s survived so much worse than losing me. She’ll be okay. She’ll be okay. She’ll be okay without me._ And Yaz wants her to be; she’d never, ever wish harm upon the Doctor. 

But, god help her, it hurts. 

It hurts to know she’ll just be another in a long list of names, and that she never even made so much as a mark upon the Doctor’s hearts before she died. It hurts to know that the Doctor has probably always seen her as a ghost, because that’s how she sees the lot of them, with their brief, insignificant lifespans and the little they get to do with them. The Doctor, in all likelihood, has already grieved Yaz. Has already moved on. 

It’s a comfort. 

It’s a wrecking ball to the ribs. 

It’s just what her garden needs to grow. 

Yaz fails to stifle her next cough. And the one after. The Doctor is still going on about sunflowers, how they grow ten times taller on the soil of Kastam and are considered so precious, in some galaxies, that blood is shed and wars are fought in their name. She tells Yaz that instead of a floral scent, theirs is a little more…

“Earthy,” Yaz finishes for her. _Explains a lot._ She coughs again. No amount of water, she fears, will hold back what’s coming next. She peels back her sheets and jumps out of bed. “Okay, thanks for the lesson. Really appreciate it. That’s probably enough.”

“But y’wanted to know everythin’!” the Doctor protests, making a startled noise when Yaz pulls her by the arm off the bed and towards the door. 

“I can just look it up.”

“Google doesn’t know what I know.” The Doctor pulls her arm free from Yaz’s hold. “Yaz, are you sure you’re—“

“Fine! Brilliant, really!” Swinging the door open, Yaz steps aside for the Doctor. “Thanks for checking in. I’m probably just gonna turn in now. Long day.”

Brows drawn, the Doctor looks over her shoulder and sweeps her eyes across Yaz’s bedroom as though the clue to her fickle temperament might be hidden in plain sight. When her eyes don’t find a thing to land on, she sets them on Yaz — who is exerting every fibre of her being on maintaining composure when the petals in her throat are working so hard to destroy it. 

“Well,” says the Doctor. “I’ll be about if y’need anythin’.”

Yaz gives a tight lipped smile. She can’t risk speaking. When it becomes apparent that Yaz is going to say nothing more, the Doctor steps through the open door. Yaz slams it in her face before she can even finish wishing her goodnight and bolts for the bathroom. She’s coughing before she gets there. 

Yaz spends an untold amount of time retching over the sink. All she earns for her troubles, in the end, is two measly petals and a little blood. She tries and tries to get more out, because there _are_ more. Yaz feels them. But they’re stubborn, and they insist on milking as much discomfort from her as possible. 

In the end, Yaz gives up. She thuds her back against the tiles and slumps to the floor, pulling her knees up to her chest and sinking her teeth into her trembling lower lip. 

_I’m dying._

Finally, Yaz begins to cry. Uncontrollable sobs wrack her whole body and she cries like she hasn’t cried since she was a child. She cries like she’s waiting for somebody to hear. Nobody does. Nobody comes. What could they do for her anyway? There’s no comfort. No cure. No way out. 

But it’s funny, really, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s funny. It’s so funny that Yaz’s lonely weeping becomes mirthless, teary laughter. She’s hysterical; reckons she ought to write this down. Her life was always a joke she never found very amusing, but that’s because she didn’t yet know the punchline — and, oh, what a kicker. 

Because, you see, after so long spent searching, and aching, and yearning, Yaz _finally_ found a thing worth living for. 

And now it’s killing her. 

It’s killing her. 

Yasmin Khan is dying (but it’s funny, really, isn’t it?).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me on tumblr: freefallthirteen


	2. anything but goodbye

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry i KNOW i said this was only gonna be two parts but it got away from me u have my word the third instalment will be the final! fair warning yaz's symptoms go into quite graphic detail in this chapter. 
> 
> TWs: blood, throwing up/retching, violence

Yaz sees no sense in telling the Doctor. 

She’d never expect someone like that to love someone like Yaz. She’d never ask her to. The way she sees it, it’s easier for everyone involved if Yaz isn’t a problem. A patient. That friend they have whose terminal disease really puts a damper on things. 

Opening up about her condition to the Doctor wouldn’t cure her, because that would require reciprocation, but it _would_ unload a tremendous guilt onto the Doctor’s shoulders. She’d have to bear that awful guilt like a demon on her back while she watched her best friend die before her eyes — helpless to save her. Yaz knows the Doctor well enough by now. She knows the Doctor would blame herself. Hell, she might even try to force herself to return Yaz’s feelings. She’d fail, but she’d make a heroic attempt.

That notion alone is almost enough to make Yaz spill her petalled guts. Would the Doctor kiss her? Desperately crash her lips into Yaz’s and try, try, try to feel something? Maybe she’d take Yaz on a date. Wine and dine her. Really make an effort to get to know her. She’d soon realise she already knows everything worth knowing, and that was never enough before. Why should it be any different now?

So no, Yaz doesn’t tell her. She keeps her mouth shut except to retch up petals and leaves and blood as discreetly as she can manage. Researching her affliction helps none. There’s nothing she reads that she doesn’t already know, or that doesn’t make her ever more miserable. 

There’s no falling out of love with the Doctor. Once you’re in it, you’re in it ‘til death — especially once the flowers come crawling. 

But how can Yaz accept that? 

She has her family to think of, her friends; a whole unlived future. She’s in her _twenties_ , for fuck’s sake. Yaz never considered herself young until she considered dying, but she is young. Heartrendingly so. 

All of that notwithstanding, Yaz doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t. It frightens her. It makes her curl up under her covers like a small child cowering from the monsters of her nightmares. There, she shakes and shivers until the sun comes up, and at daybreak she breathes a sigh of relief. How many sunrises does she have left? How many, until there are sunflowers sprouting from between her decaying ribs, basking in a light she’ll never know again? East to west then back again. If she concentrates, Yaz terrifies herself into thinking she can feel the flower heads turning inside of her. Moving. Writhing. Alive. The thought makes her nauseous. She vomits up plants.

Yaz doesn’t want to be an ivory flower bed. Yaz doesn’t want to count her sunsets and her sunrises and her every last breath in cold dread. So she has to try to survive.

Through whatever means necessary. 

A couple of weeks has passed since Yaz’s grim fate first reared its sadistic head; its glinting scythe. 

The Doctor is in the console room when Yaz finds her. She’s wearing her apron and has a welding mask pulled over her face, the flame from her propane torch turning her visor to pure light. Yaz has to call her name a few times before the Doctor switches off her torch and lifts the mask. 

“Hi, Yaz! Sorry, didn’t see you come in.” She itches her nose with the back of a gloved hand and the way her face screws up plucks at every string of Yaz’s heart. What sad music it makes. “Everythin’ all right?”

“Uh, actually, I kinda need to talk to you,” Yaz says, wringing her hands. This isn’t going to be easy. 

“Look, if this is about the incident in the fourth bathroom, you’ll have to talk to Graham. Had nowt to do with me,” insists the Doctor, pointing her torch at Yaz as she speaks. 

Yaz breathes a futile attempt at a laugh. “That’s not it. I — actually, do you mind?” She nods at the Doctor’s gear. It’s hard to take her seriously when she’s dressed like a mad scientist. Which she sort of is, but that’s besides the point. 

“Ah. Right, ‘course.” The Doctor sets her torch down and strips off her gloves and apron. The welding mask is last to come off, leaving her hair sticking out in various places where the strap held it in place. There’s a streak of dirt on her cheek when she approaches. Yaz fixates on it, because it makes it easier to bear her with what she’s about to say. “So what’s—“

“I’m leaving,” Yaz blurts. No use in beating around the bush. The quicker she gets this over with, the easier it’ll be. Plus, there’s no telling how long they have before she’s vomiting sunflowers again. 

“Oh. All right, where you off?” wonders the Doctor, misunderstanding. “Ooh, on your way back, could you bring us some jelly babies? Proper craving some right now.”

Yaz sets her jaw. She tries again. “No, Doctor, I’m not just nipping somewhere.” A shaky breath. “I’m leaving the TARDIS. Indefinitely.”

For a handful of seconds the Doctor doesn’t react. Gears turn. Brakes slam. The penny drops. “You’re — you don’t — wait, you don’t want to travel with me anymore?” The Doctor’s pupils flit rapidly between every individual feature of Yaz’s face. “ _Ever_?” The way that last word comes out, jagged and fragile and downright crushed, brings tears to Yaz’s eyes. 

She had a whole excuse prepared, but it leaves her now. Strands her in the fallout of her own sorry choices. “Well, I mean… it’s — it might not be forever. I dunno. It’s just…”

“Why?” breathes the Doctor. She looks heartbroken. 

_She isn’t_ , Yaz reminds herself. She’s hurt, but her hearts are intact. They’ve weathered far stronger storms before. They’ll weather this, too. 

Yaz still isn’t looking her in the eye. “It’s just my time. I need to stop playing pretend up in the stars with you and get back to my real life.” The words sound hollow, harsh, and far more cutting than she ever intended. “My job, my family… I’ve gotta stop neglecting them, Doctor.”

“But… but we can work that out. Y’dont need to leave.” The Doctor shakes her head and takes a step forward. She smells like solder and smoke and earth and sunflowers. 

Yaz’s chest constricts. 

When she steps away from her, the look of absolute hurt scored onto the Doctor’s face knocks the wind out of Yaz like a punch to the stomach. She desperately wants to explain; opens her mouth to do so. But what would she even say? 

_Wait, it’s not like that. I only can’t be so close to you because I love you. I only can’t be so close to you because I’m so tired of swallowing seeds. I only can’t be so close to you because I’ll never be close enough._

It’s no use. 

She saves her breath. It’s more precious than ever these days, after all. 

“Oh,” mumbles the Doctor. She regards the space between them like it’s a sign Yaz is holding up. Whatever words she reads upon it, Yaz knows to be false, and yet what can she do except allow her to believe them? The Doctor scratches her eyebrow with her thumbnail and doesn’t lift her gaze. “So you _want_ to leave.”

“No,” sighs Yaz. “Or — maybe. I dunno. It’s complicated.”

“Mhm.” 

“It probably won’t be forever.” Not if, by some miracle, she heals herself of the love that plagues her. “I mean, this isn’t goodbye. Not really.”

The Doctor turns away. She draws towards the hexagonal steps and slumps onto them, thudding her forehead onto her palm. The panels in the wall shift from warm orange to a deeper shade that borders on red. Yaz wants nothing more than to reach for her. If only she could put her arms around her, find some unlikely way to console her, she’d do it in a heartbeat. As it stands, any efforts she makes will only end up twisting the knife. For both of them. 

At last, the Doctor picks her head up. Yaz’s lungs itch when their eyes meet. “Tell me where I went wrong,” she pleads. “I tried so hard this time. I tried to be different. Better. Where did I go wrong?”

“Doctor, it isn’t your fault. I swear.” Yaz has to refrain from coming any closer; plants her feet and balls her hands into fists at her sides. “You’ve been amazing. This—“ she gestures broadly at the TARDIS— “has been amazing. I wouldn’t change a single second, and I don’t want you to regret any of it, ‘cause I definitely don’t.”

The Doctor holds her in her sights for a long, agonising moment. “Make me understand, Yaz. We were happy. _You_ were happy, up until a few weeks ago. What changed? Where’d you go?”

Yaz is at a loss. She thought she’d been doing a pretty good job of hiding her torment, but evidently not. “Like I said, Doctor, I realised here isn't where I need to be anymore. Guess I just didn’t know how to bring it up until now.”

“If it was somethin’ else, you’d tell me, wouldn't you?” the Doctor implores. If Yaz didn’t know any better, she’d say it sounds like the Doctor _wants_ there to be something else. Something she can fix. A puzzle to solve, a clock to rewind, a code to break. This isn’t that. 

“‘Course I’d tell you,” croaks Yaz.

“You promise?”

She hesitates only for a second. “There’s nothing else.”

Whether the Doctor believes her or not is unclear. The shattered frown on her face is sowing seed after seed after seed and Yaz needs to get as far away from her as possible.

“The lads are still staying,” Yaz offers, hoping it’ll ease the Doctor’s strife some. “I’ll talk to them myself. Explain everything.”

“Maybe y’can explain it to them better than you did me,” the Doctor utters. There’s a bitterness to her tone that Yaz isn’t accustomed to — least of all when directed at her. 

“You’re angry.”

“No, Yaz,” sighs the Doctor. “I’m sad.”

Yaz clears her throat. Tries to, anyway. It does little to help. Really, now, she needs to get going. “I really am sorry, Doctor. You have no idea how sorry I am.” Too much; dial it back. “I, um… I wanted to thank you. For showing me the stars. For making me feel like the most special person in the universe for a while. For being my friend. I really needed a friend when I met you.”

The Doctor nods slowly. “But not anymore.”

“That’s not what I meant. You’ll always be my friend.”

“So I can still come ‘round for tea at Yaz’s?” asks the Doctor, and an ember of misguided hope lights up her face. It kills Yaz to stamp it out.

“I… I don’t think that’s a good idea.” God, this is so much harder than she thought it’d be — and she thought it’d be impossible. The Doctor’s face falls. “It’s nothin’ personal. Seriously. It’s just—“

“No, no. I get it.” The Doctor gets to her feet. She doesn’t look sad anymore. Doesn’t look much of anything. In the time it takes her to cross from the steps to the console, she’s completely closed herself off. It kills Yaz to witness that. “You’ve got your _real_ life to focus on. Can’t have me swoopin’ in on my big old time machine when you’ve got crooks to book and family game night to think about, can you?”

“Doctor…”

The Doctor flicks a series of switches on various panels of the console, gives the sand timer a calculated spin, and pulls the dematerialisation lever. “I mean, where do I fit in all that mundanity? I really don’t, do I? Part of bein’ an alien, I s’pose.” The time rotor heaves up and down and, moments later, thuds to a stop with a tinny, resounding bang. Slipping her hands into the pockets of her culottes, the Doctor nods towards the doors. “Sheffield. Home. Your actual home, that is. Pack your bags already?”

“Um, I’ll just ask Ryan or…” Yaz chews her lip and glances towards the window, which shines white and alludes to an overcast sky. 

“Sure. Don’t lemme keep you then.” 

Yaz’s shoulders slump. “Doctor, don’t be like this. Please.”

The Doctor feigns innocence. “Like what?”

“This is hard for me too!” she shouts. The Doctor lifts her brows and Yaz pinches her nose; exhales deeply. “It’s already hard enough to say goodbye to you. Don’t make it harder.”

“You said it’s not goodbye. Not forever,” the Doctor questions, eyes narrow.

“It isn’t.” Unless Yaz can’t stop loving her. Unless she chokes to death in the meantime. Unless, unless, unless. “But it’s goodbye for now, and I don’t want it to be an angry goodbye. Do you?”

“I told you, I’m not angry.”

“Well then I don’t want it to be sad.”

“Goodbyes are always sad.”

“Then I don’t want it to be a goodbye!”

“So stay.”

Yaz locks her hands together on top of her head and turns her back on the Doctor, fearful that her infuriatingly expressive face is liable to betray the truth under the Doctor’s magnifying glass of a scrutinous eye. Yaz would give anything to stay. She considers herself a good person: kind, selfless, courageous. She’d turn her back on every last one of her values not to have to walk away. Make a monster of herself, so long it was a monster the Doctor might love. 

“I can’t,” trembles Yaz. Her cheeks are wet and she wipes them down with the front of her shirt before braving the Doctor once more. “I’ve made up my mind.”

Drawing a slow breath in through her nostrils, the Doctor’s eyes roam the room. She looks at anything but Yaz. “Won’t be the same here without you, Yaz. If you’re dead set on leavin’, I won’t try to change your mind, but I want you to know y’made a difference. A big one. I’m gonna feel it when you’re gone.”

“Nah, you’ll find a way to fill the space. Always another adventure through those doors. Always more trouble to get yourself into. You’ll forget all about me in no time.”

Disappointment weighs at the outermost edges of the Doctor’s mouth. “It’s no wonder you wanna go, if you really believe that.”

Yaz can’t keep doing this; can’t keep justifying herself and trying to make sense of a situation that makes none. She’ll be here all day, and she doesn’t have that long. “So are you gonna walk me out or what?”

The Doctor’s smile isn’t true, and it definitely isn’t happy, but it’s there. “It would be my honour, Yasmin Khan.”

Side by side, they head for the doors. Their steps are slow, as if they each are trying to draw out every last second of Yaz’s departure for as long as the realm of possibility will grant. They reach the end of the line all too soon. Yaz stares at the window; she doesn’t know how to proceed. In the end, it’s the Doctor who opens the door for her, stepping aside and leaning her shoulder against the wood. Outside, Sheffield is cold and grey. Yaz wants to turn and run and beg the Doctor to take her anywhere else. She quells the urge. 

“I don’t know what to say,” Yaz confesses. 

“Anythin’ but goodbye.”

Yaz chews the inside of her cheek. When she looks at the Doctor, the words she speaks are not the words that have been tucked under her tongue for so long. Not even close. “There’s dirt on your face.”

“Well. Isn’t quite what I meant.” The Doctor tries to wipe the grime away with her sleeve but she keeps missing, so Yaz rolls her eyes, licks her thumb, and holds the Doctor’s head in place as she swipes the dirt from her cheek. The Doctor is stiller than the dead. She stares at Yaz and Yaz makes the unforgivable mistake of glancing up at two eyes so wide they have their own gravitational pull. Yaz is caught in it; can’t break free. Her thumb dances across the Doctor’s cheekbone — mere centimetres from her lips. How easy. How easy this all could be if those lips asked hers for a kiss. 

The Doctor waits. Yaz doesn’t have time enough to consider what she might be waiting for before watching her window shrink and then vanish. “Gone?”

Gravity lets Yaz go. She gives a curt nod and her hand slips from the Doctor’s cheek when she steps back. “Gone.”

What a word.

What an agonisingly lonely word. 

“So,” says the Doctor. She casts her eyes towards Yaz’s flat. “This is you then. Sunny Sheffield. Any plans?”

_Survive._

“Who knows? Maybe I’ll finally get around to finishing my probation.”

The Doctor grins. “I have every faith in you, PC Khan. Every faith in the universe.”

A scratch in Yaz’s throat tempts her poise. She closes her hand around the tissue in her jacket pocket. “Next time you see me, I’m gonna be running this place. Just you wait.”

“Yeah.” The Doctor absently taps the door handle with her index finger. Her grin fades. “Next time.”

Yaz coughs. She doesn’t even feel it coming but, the next time it happens, she’s ready with a tissue covering her mouth. She’s fortunate (if one can call it that); it doesn’t devolve into a full blown fit. Following a few dry coughs, she pulls the tissue away. Her blood freezes over like an arctic sea. Right there in her hand, there’s a petal — stark yellow against the white of the tissue. They never usually come up so easy. Yaz doesn’t have to be an expert to know that isn’t a good sign.

“Really should get that cough looked at,” advises the Doctor, prompting Yaz to scrunch her tissue up and shove it back into her pocket. 

“Will do. Promise,” Yaz blags. She backs up. “Anyway, I should get going. Think I’ve loitered in your doorway long enough.”

“Oh.” The Doctors straightens. This is happening. Right now. “Okay. Yeah. Um. Right.”

The soles of Yaz’s boots find tarmac and the winter chill welcomes her home with an uncomfortable embrace she wants to shake off. A few errant strands of hair whip her face; get caught in her mouth. Like so much else. So much that never made it past the tip of her tongue. 

“I’ll see you, Doctor,” Yaz says, because this isn’t a goodbye. It isn’t a goodbye. It feels like a goodbye. 

“Yes you will, Yasmin Khan.”

They stand on opposite sides of the threshold and regard one another in somber silence for a beat. But there’s nothing left to say. Nothing honest. So Yaz takes a breath, gives a brief wave of her hand, and walks away. She’s halfway towards her building when the Doctor’s voice, battling with the wind, stops her.

“Yaz!”

Yaz looks over her shoulder. The Doctor is biting her lip, grimacing; holding onto the frame of the door like it’s the only thing keeping her from sprinting after her. The muscles in her cheek flex and she sighs. Yaz can’t hear it from where she is, but she sees the way the Doctor’s body wilts with it. 

“Just… be brilliant, yeah?” The words sound like a compromise. What did she really want to say? “Be incredible. I only ever made you feel special ‘cause you already were. Remember that.”

Untempered melancholy finds purchase behind Yaz’s black eyes. “I’ll carry you with me, Doctor.”

“And I you, Yaz. Always.”

The Doctor kisses her fingers, bares them to Yaz, and then retreats without another word. The door closes. Yaz can’t watch this bit. Hunching her shoulders, she continues towards the complex. Her tears don’t start falling in earnest until the familiar groan of foreign engines fades to nothing. 

She doesn’t have to turn to know the Doctor is gone. 

* * *

Wherever she goes, Yaz leaves a trail of petals in her wake — like Hansel and Gretel afraid of forgetting their way home. But this is not a fairytale. Yaz burned her home to the ground the day she left the Doctor’s side. 

Everything Yaz reads online, every last book she tears through in the library, tells her that hers is a hopeless endeavour. 

But it’s such a rare malady — how can anybody be sure? 

There are always exceptions. 

That’s what she tells herself when she’s doubled over the toilet with the shower running to mask the sound of her retching. It’s what she tells herself when she has nightmares about a whole field of sunflowers coming alive in the night and climbing, one by one, down her throat — only to wake up on top of sheets littered with petals and blooms and leaves and stems. It’s what she tells herself when her fingers ache to pick up the phone and call the Doctor. 

How hard can it be to stop loving someone? Can her love really span an infinity, like she believes in the depths of her wounded soul that it does? Everyone probably feels like that when they’re in love. Doesn’t make it true. 

So she waits it out, this gory sickness, and she breaks her promise to the Doctor. Yaz can’t possibly carry her with her when her only chance at salvation is letting her go. Guilt weighs heavy on her like a tonne of bricks, and another is added to the pile with every passing day that she doesn’t reach out to the Doctor. Yaz won’t even allow Ryan and Graham to talk about her when they visit. They understand Yaz’s decision even less than the Doctor did. Graciously, they don’t pry. 

It becomes increasingly difficult for Yaz to hide her affliction. She coughs all through the night, conscious or otherwise, and her family is fast to notice. Yaz dismisses their concerns with a fabrication about a bug that’s going around, but that lie won’t hold up forever. She also gets short of breath far easier than she ever used to. When she works out, Yaz hardly lasts twenty minutes before her objecting lungs force her to take a break or empty up another flowerpot. Or two. Or three or four or five. On more than one occasion, during her daily lap around the local park, Yaz succumbs to another violent episode and finds herself kneeling by the side of the lake. Her blood-stained petals float on the surface of the water and she watches them drift further and further from the bank, wondering if any of this is helping at all. Wondering if she made a mistake.

Work isn’t any easier. If they were to discover her illness, they’d have her out in an instant, but hiding it comes at a cost. She takes all the shifts nobody wants — graveyards, mostly — and complains incessantly about all of her partners until they finally agree to let her patrol the beat alone. It alienates her from her colleagues, but she can think of no other option. 

It’s been months since Yaz has seen the Doctor. She’s still in love with her. She’s still dying. 

It’s three o’ clock in the morning, or thereabouts, when Yaz pulls her patrol car into a nearly empty car park outside a twenty four hour supermarket. She buys a cup of coffee. It tastes like mud, as it does every time, but it’s at least warm in her frost-numb hands when she returns to her vehicle and leans against the hood, eyes on the night sky. 

And this is the time she allows herself.

One cup of coffee, every shift, and she lets herself sit and think about the Doctor until the last, bitter dregs slide down her throat. Ten minutes. No more and no less. 

Tonight, the sky is too thick with dark clouds to indulge her with a glimpse of either stars or moon, but all Yaz has to do is close her eyes and she can see it all. Galaxies a swirling vortex of colourful dust, red suns burning behind her retinas, endless glittering horizons and the golden fields in which they ran together. 

For all those miraculous sights, the one thing Yaz’s mind returns to every single night, without fail, is the Doctor’s smile. Even now, she can imagine it so vividly. Every crease in her face and around her giddy eyes, the scrunch of her nose; pastel pink lips stretching to reveal perfect teeth — which sink perfectly into the fragile tissue of Yaz’s imperfect heart. The Doctor’s smiles, projected onto the back of Yaz’s eyelids, play on a tireless loop. Yaz slows them down. Goes through them frame by frame. Freezes the picture at the exact moment their eyes meet, and then suddenly the Doctor isn’t just smiling. She’s smiling at Yaz. 

It hits her like an atom bomb every time.

She envies whatever makes her smile these days. Envies all those brand new worlds, those impossibilities lying in wait for her eager discovery; those small wonders she finds tucked under everyday rocks or hidden in people’s gestures of quiet nobility. Did she ever see any wonder in Yaz? She must have. 

She let her stay, after all. And, when Yaz asked, she let her go. Yaz thinks there’s love in that. Not the kind she’s after — not a vaccine — but the only kind the Doctor can hope to manage where Yaz is concerned. 

This time around, Yaz’s moment of private reflection is cut short before she can even get halfway through her coffee. 

It all happens pretty fast. 

Across the street, a shifty looking character walks by: hood pulled over his head, hands in his pockets, constantly looking over his shoulder like there’s someone on his tail. He’s acting sketchy. Usually, there’s a reason for that. Yaz peels away from the hood of her car and tracks him with her eyes, but he doesn’t spot her until her radio crackles to life and relays a BOLO matching his description. Their eyes meet. He freezes. 

No sooner have the muscles in Yaz’s legs twitched with the intent to move than he bolts. Cursing, Yaz tosses her cup into the nearby bin and takes off after him, reporting her pursuit to the radio all the while. 

“Oi!” she shouts. Her heavy boots pound the pavement and follow him past shuttered storefronts and vacant roads. Only their hurried footfall and distant sirens punctuate the dead quiet of the night. He’s fast enough, she grants him that, but Yaz is pretty fast herself. She pretends her lungs aren’t dissenting so painfully and propels herself just a little more, chasing him around the next bend, over a fence, into an alleyway — and straight into a dead end.

He’s standing with his back to the brick and his hands concealed in the pouch of his hoodie. Yaz slows to a stop several metres from him and pulls out her handcuffs. 

“Hands where I can see ‘em,” she instructs. Her breathing is haggard and downright excruciating. She coughs into the high-vis material of her sleeve and hopes that’s the last of it. “I’m placing you under arrest, you understand? Now remove your hands from your—“ Yaz’s hand flies to her mouth and she continues to cough, and then the coughing worsens, and she’s bracing herself with a palm to the brick, and she can’t stop, she can’t stop, she can’t _breathe_. Something’s blocking her airway — and it’s huge. It’s smothering her. There’s blood on her tongue and on her chapped lips and on her chin. 

In a blur, the man she’s cornered runs at her. By the time she thinks to lift her arms and defend herself, it’s too late. A glint of metal. A blind jab. Sharp, shooting pain in Yaz’s side elicits a strangled cry from her overcrowded throat. He shoves her against the wall and flees, vanishing around the corner before Yaz can even hit the floor. Oh, and there’s blood on the floor, too. 

Yaz distantly registers the fact that she’s been stabbed. Frankly, that’s the least of her worries. 

On her hands and knees, she heaves, hacks, retches. More blood splatters the gravel and the obstruction in her throat hardly moves. She’s gasping for breath that isn’t getting in. By her count, she’s got a handful of seconds before she passes out. A handful more before she dies, right there on all fours in a dirty alleyway — far from home and far from a single person she loves. The Doctor’s eyes, and all the untold colours of the universe they contain, flash before her mind’s eye. 

_It’s not goodbye._

With a downright savage scream, which is bred from both determination and genuine distress, Yaz bears her palms harder against loose rocks and broken glass and forces herself to keep trying. She won’t give up until her very least breath — if only to see _her_ one more time. 

Face sticky with blood and tears, she tries to make herself throw up. She shoves her fingers to the back of her throat and gags. More blood, more saliva. Yaz thinks she spots a petal fall from her mouth, but her vision is failing her and the world swims in and out of focus like a malfunctioning lens. The next time her blood-caked fingernails claw for her tonsils, they’re met with something else instead. Staving off unconsciousness with sheer force of will, she closes her fingers around it and yanks. 

First out are the petals.

It’s hard to see the yellow for the blackish-red of her blood. Yaz has never seen so much of her own body fluids before. It’s almost impressive. Almost. It doesn’t hold a candle to what comes next — because the petals, this time, aren’t loose. They’re attached to something. A head. And the head is attached to a stem. It’s long, and it’s leafy, and it’s thick. The stem slithers up her throat as she pulls and pulls on it; she doesn’t stop retching until the whole thing is, at last, free from her body. 

Yaz collapses. On her back, she sucks in several sharp, needy lungfuls of oxygen with her fingers curled loosely around her throat. Her chest heaves. Her ribs are searing. She thinks she might be bleeding out. 

When the ambulance finds her a short time later, Yaz is lying in an oil-slick pool of her own blood and holding onto lucidity by a thread. In one hand, she's clutching a sunflower. In the other, she holds a phone to her ear. The call connects on the second ring. 

“Doctor,” Yaz rasps. “Come home.”


	3. iron and salt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not v happy w the ending of this also im so sorry for how long it is but i didnt wanna do yall dirty and split it into ANOTHER two parts so idk u decide if this is worse lmao enjoy x

The crawl back to Yaz’s body is slow and gruelling. It takes the patience of a fighter; the heart of a lover. It takes an unerring will to survive. 

There are times when her exhausted organs come close to giving up on her. Even though Yaz isn’t conscious for most of it, there’s something embedded in the core of her being. It’s not flowers, and it’s not the serrated blade of a knife. It’s a memory. It’s two people holding hands on the billboard above a quiet highway, talking about loneliness and constellations and trading bashful smiles like two old friends who haven’t seen one another in so long. And that’s what it has always felt like to Yaz; like she’s known the Doctor before. In another lifetime. 

In all of them. 

This memory does more for Yaz than the blood transfusions, and the scalpels, and the sterile utensils and gloved fingers digging around beneath her skin. This memory is at the heart of a whole interconnected web of so many like it. It weaves around her weary heart and clings to her longing bones and she climbs it, silk thread by silk thread, until the murky surface ripples just within arm’s reach and refracts the harsh, fluorescent light of reality directly into her eyes. 

Granted, there are a few false starts. Groggy eyelids flutter but don’t open and disembodied voices echo in her ears like dreams: some familiar, some not. 

“ _Lucky, this one. If they hadn’t found her when they did, she’d be worm food right now.”_

“ _Lucky? Guess you didn’t hear what they found in her lungs._ " 

_“What did they find?”_

_“Flowers.”_

_“Flowers? Shit. How far along?”_

_“Far. Her family doesn’t even know yet. I think — wait, is she waking up? Go get the…”_

Time swims away from her. Yaz runs from clinical apathy and chases something warmer. 

“ _I just don’t understand, Hakim. They all keep saying she’s going to be fine, but_ …”

“ _But what, love_?”

“ _The way they look at her. The way they look at_ us _. The nurses and the doctors — nobody in this whole place can look us in the eye! Something’s going on. I know it is_.”

“ _Why would they lie? Our daughter’s going to wake up. That’s what they said. Can’t we just be happy_?”

“ _S_ _o you choose now to deny the existence of a conspiracy?”_

The voices are familiar, but no warmer. Yaz pulls the darkness over her, like a shield protecting her from the truth and its many consequences, and waits in the shadows for a different dawn. In the end, it’s a single word that draws her back into the light. 

“...family’ll probably be back soon. Had to send her whole squad home, though. Taking up too much space in the waiting room. Never known a patient so popular. Not to mention that Doctor character who’s been kipping in the hallway.” The muscles in Yaz’s hand twitch and a thin crack of intense light splinters the ceiling of darkness, like a coffin door, she’s been buried beneath for an indeterminate amount of time. “Where does she get off, calling herself that in a hospital full of actual doctors? She tried to diagnose one of my patients earlier.”

“Really? Was she right?”

“Er, well…”

“Where is she?” Yaz tries to ask, but her throat is too dry and her head too fuzzy. The only sound she makes is an incoherent wheeze. She forces her eyes open to find a doctor (not the right one) and a nurse staring at her from the end of her cot. 

“Yasmin?” The doctor hooks the chart in his hands back onto the bed and then rounds it to her side. “Yasmin, are you with me?”

“Where is she?” Yaz attempts for the second time. Still hoarse, but the words at least take shape this time. Both her doctor and her nurse are looking at her like she’s sprouting two heads. Or sprouting flowers from her lungs. “I wanna see her.”

“Miss Khan—“

“It’s PC.”

Chagrined, the doctor purses his lips and corrects himself. “PC Khan, do you know where you are?”

Yaz makes a point of looking down at herself: the wires plugged into her body, the hospital gown, the morphine drip, the thin, sterile sheets that are about as comfortable as rough paper against her bare legs. She looks up at the doctor. “Alton Towers?”

“Very funny.” He isn’t laughing. 

Yaz sighs. “I’m in hospital. Sheffield. Yorkshire. England. Earth. The Milky Way. Should I go on?”

“That’s quite enough, thank you.” The doctor nods his head at the nurse by way of dismissal. After offering Yaz a sympathetic smile she wants to wipe off his face with the back of her hand, the nurse shuffles out of the room. “Do you know why you’re here, PC Khan?”

“I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume getting stabbed didn’t do me any favours.” Yaz knows she’s being rude. She doesn’t even know why; all she knows is that she’s itching for this conversation to be over so that she can finally set sights on the woman who’s been haunting her drug-addled fever dreams with false promises of futures that don’t exist. Yaz doesn’t hold it against her. A future would be nice, but she’ll settle for one more day. One more smile. 

One last look. 

Kipping in the hallway — that’s what they said. How close is she? A matter of yards? Metres? Yaz leans forward to steal a glance around the grey blinds, which are drawn over a mostly glass wall separating her room from the corridor. The instant she moves, however, a splitting pain spears her as acutely as if she’s been stabbed again. Yaz grunts and falls back. Instinctively, she reaches for the bandaging wrapped tightly around her upper body. By the feel of it, the bastard got her right below the armpit.

“Please try to take it easy,” warns the doctor with raised palms. “You don’t want to rip your stitches.”

Frustrated, Yaz thuds the back of her head against the pillow and drags a hand down her face. “How long have I been here?” 

“It’s been almost a week. Honestly, it’s a wonder you’re still with us. Your injuries were quite severe on their own, but…” The doctor pauses. “Well, there were other complications. I’m sure you’re aware by now, PC Khan, but you appear to be suffering from a rare form of lung disease known as—“

“Yeah, I know. I’m lovesick. Terminally.” Yaz shrugs — and regrets it when another bolt of pain frazzles what feels like every nerve in her body. She swallows the need to cry out. “Didn’t need any doctors to diagnose the petals falling out of my mouth.”

“Maybe not, but we’ve had to save you from choking to death on multiple different occasions. While you were unconscious, we performed a non-invasive surgery to remove some of the larger, more life threatening, plants in your lungs. It’s only a temporary measure, of course. They will grow back. But, for now, you should find that it’s a little easier to breathe.”

Yaz can’t help but laugh. “You weeded me?”

“I don’t think you understand,” frowns the doctor. “Getting stabbed probably saved your life. You were hours from asphyxiation when you turned up here. If that.”

“You didn’t save my life. You prolonged the inevitable.”

The Doctor runs a hand through his coarse, white hair. “Unfortunately that’s true. Now, if we continue to regularly _weed_ your lungs, as you so aptly put it, we might be able to buy you some more time. A few more months, maybe. The downside is, you’d be spending your final days here. In the hospital. And I’ll be honest, the procedures aren’t very pleasant.”

“I’m not dying here,” Yaz refuses. She doesn’t entertain the idea for a second. “How long do I have left right now? Without any more procedures?”

“I mean, it’s tricky to—“

“If you had to guess.”

“If I had to guess…” The Doctor shakes his head. For the first time, he actually looks sorry. He looks something a little closer to human. “A couple of weeks. Tops. I’m very sorry, PC Khan. I know this must be a shock.”

It is. It’s a shock.

But only because it’s far more than she’d hoped for. 

Two whole weeks to make up for the months she missed by the Doctor’s side. She didn’t think she was destined to last another day. Her resultant grin obviously perplexes her doctor, because he starts talking about services they provide to help her cope, and reiterates the whole you're-gonna-die thing to ensure it’s properly sinking in. But Yaz is overjoyed.

She’s got _time_.

And two weeks? Well, two weeks can last a whole lifetime if you spend it in the right company. She knows that better than anybody. 

“The Doctor, where is she?” Yaz asks, abruptly cutting the wrong doctor off mid-sentence. “You said she was here. I want to see her.”

“Well, yes, I do believe she was starting fights with vending machines, last I saw her,” he reveals, his distaste plain. Yaz hides a smile. “We’ve been limiting your visits to family only.“

“I think you’ll find she is family.”

“Unfort—“

“If you don’t let her in, I’ll bloody well rip all these tubes out of my body and go get her myself,” Yaz threatens. “Look at my face and tell me I’m lying.”

The doctor’s frown capitulates to dawning realisation with a telling glance at Yaz’s chest. “Ah.” He clasps his hands together behind his back. “I see.”

Yaz cocks a brow. “What exactly do you see?”

“You know, it’s none of my business, but if she’s the one causing all this, it might be worth talking to her. Telling her what’s going on. She’s been camping out in this hospital all week just waiting for you to wake up. Maybe she feels the same way.”

“Know what, mate? You’re right. It is none of your business.” Yaz jabs a finger towards the door. “Now go get her.”

When he leaves the room, Yaz thinks she has more time to prepare herself for seeing the Doctor again after so long. She thinks she has a few minutes, at least, to go over what she wants to say — explanations, excuses, lies — and to brace herself against the incoming flood of concern that she knows is bound to rush in upon the opening of the door and the meeting of eyes.

But then the door opens not twenty seconds later, and Yaz knows there was no way she was ever going to be able to prepare herself for seeing those eyes again. 

For so long, she only ever saw them in her dreams. In her nightmares. She even saw them as she was knocking on the Reaper’s door, when the life in them flashed before her own eyes and beseeched her to keep fighting. Merely a mirage; they had nothing on the real article.

Except, when the Doctor’s eyes finally land on Yaz for the first time in many grey months, it isn’t life Yaz sees in them. It’s not the burnished copper-gold of them that she notices. In fact, there’s a total dearth of any colour at all. No brushstrokes of joy, no curiosity streaked across her irises like watercolours; no thrill to bring the portrait alive with its usual champagne-effervescence.

All that remains, then, is horror.

The Doctor freezes in the doorway when she sees Yaz; sees the god-awful state she’s in. Yaz hasn’t looked in a mirror, but she can imagine how ghastly she looks. How sunken. How fragile. She’s not the only one looking worse for wear. The Doctor is missing her coat, and is down to just a creased white undershirt and her culottes. Braces hang from hips, shirtsleeves are rolled up to the elbow, hair is bedraggled, and dark bags are stamped into her paler-than-usual skin.

The Doctor’s lips part around a heart wrenching gasp and she covers her mouth with her hand, crouching on her haunches because, apparently, she can’t stand to see what Yaz has become in her absence. “Oh, Yaz. What have I done to you?” she trembles into her fist. 

And then she’s on her feet again, and she’s across the room, and Yaz still hasn’t said a word. Tenderly, the Doctor touches a hand to Yaz’s cheek. “This is all my fault.”

Dread blooms like creeping frost across every inch of Yaz’s body. Does she know? Did they tell her? Did she sneak in and take a peek at her chart when no one was watching? Yaz’s brain is still whirring incessantly, still scrambling for something to say, when the Doctor sinks onto the chair at her bedside and takes her hand.

Oh. She’s holding her hand.

Yaz’s head goes quiet again.

“I should’ve kept a better eye on you, Yaz. I knew it,” rues the Doctor. Yaz holds her breath. “I _knew_ how reckless you’d become and I still let you go.”

Slow, Yaz blinks. “What?”

The Doctor springs out of her seat and runs her hands through her tangled hair, pacing the length of Yaz’s bedside. She can’t keep still. Can’t calm down. They’re not holding hands anymore. “All those times out there, I watched you risk your life like it was nothin’. I should’ve said somethin’ back then. Addressed it.” She stops pacing, sets her grave eyes on Yaz. “I should’ve stopped you from walkin’ out that door. This was bound to happen.”

“Wait, so you — um — this is about me getting stabbed?” 

Bewilderment sets like a cast on the Doctor’s face. “No, Yaz, this is about what you’ve done with your hair.” Yaz did get a haircut recently. She’s glad the Doctor noticed. “Gods, what were you even _thinking_? Your mum said that when they found you…” The Doctor swallows what Yaz thinks might have been a sob, if she hadn’t choked it back. 

Yaz spreads her hands. “It’s my job, Doctor. I wasn’t being reckless. It’s literally my job.”

“You should’ve waited for backup.”

“I had him.”

“Clearly.” With a heavy sigh, the Doctor ducks her chin and massages her forehead. Yaz’s heart breaks for her. If this is the state she’s in after a near miss, Yaz doesn’t think she’s going to handle her death as well as she’d hoped. “I’m sorry, Yaz. This isn’t how I wanted this to go. It’s just — I’ve been waitin’ out there all week, and the amount of times I had to sit on my hands and watch a horde of doctors and nurses rush into your room to try and bring you back…”

“This isn’t your fault, Doctor. It’s just one of those things. He had a knife. It was dark. I didn’t see it ‘til it were too late. But I’m awake. I’m here.”

The tears in the Doctor’s eyes gleam in the fluorescents and Yaz resents herself for them. This is the second time she’s let the Doctor down. And she’s nowhere close to done. “You didn’t even call for help,” she croaks. “You just called me.”

“They’re the same thing.”

“You could’ve died!”

Yaz lowers her eyes. “Just needed to hear your voice before I did.”

Only the ticking of a clock and the beep of Yaz’s heart monitor accompany the ensuing stretch of silence. Yaz starts when she feels a hand on her shoulder, looking up to find that the Doctor’s face is inches from hers. Oh, the torment she finds raging behind those big, sad eyes. The Doctor leans down and presses a salty kiss to Yaz’s forehead, and the heart monitor trips over itself. If the Doctor notices, she doesn’t mention it when she peels her lips from Yaz’s clammy skin and replaces them with her own forehead until they’re both suffocating in the thick of one another’s suffering.

“I’m so glad you’re okay, Yaz,” the Doctor whispers. 

Except she isn’t. Yaz is further from okay than she’s ever been; when she looks over her shoulder, she can’t even see it as a speck on the horizon. She’s drifted too far from that shore and now she’s lost at sea, where a black, looming wave eclipses her sky. Any day now. 

Any day. 

“Doctor, can you do something for me?”

“Of course, Yaz.” The Doctor pulls marginally back but her hand still rests on Yaz’s shoulder. “Whatever you need.”

Yaz tries for a smile; her first one in ages. “Take me out of here.”

“What?”

“I wanna come back to the TARDIS. I wanna travel with you again. If I have to spend another night here, I’m gonna lose my mind.” There’s no sense in staying away from her anymore. All those days they could’ve had together, and she threw them away. For what? Only to end up right here where she was always going to. “Take me with you.”

The Doctor grins. And there is the light. There is the colour. There is the woman she loves to death. “I’d like nothin’ more in the universe, Yasmin Khan. Soon as you’re properly recovered—“

“No. It has to be today.”

“There’s no rush, Yaz. You need to get better. Your family’s on the way. And Ryan and Graham. They’re all dyin’ to see you.”

“And I’ll wait for them, but then you’ve gotta take me away.” Each of her breaths is numbered. She can’t waste them. Yaz inhales and imagines she’s breathing new life into the sunflowers in her lungs; exhales and tastes their viridescence. “Nobody even has to know. You’ve got a time machine. We can be back before they even blink.”

They won’t be, of course. Yaz doesn’t intend to make it home alive. 

“Yaz…”

“Can you honestly tell me there isn’t some miracle medicine on your TARDIS that won’t heal me up five times better than anything in this place?” challenges Yaz. 

The Doctor looks torn. “Maybe, but — I mean, what’s a couple more days of rest?”

Fifteen percent. 

“You don’t understand how much I’ve missed you, Doctor. These past few months have been the loneliest of my whole life. I need to get away from here. Please. I’m begging.” Yaz squeezes her eyes shut and takes a shuddering breath. “Two weeks. Just me and you and the universe. That’s all I’m asking.”

The Doctor chuckles. “And nobody’ll notice that you’ve made a miraculous overnight recovery when you come back?”

“I don’t care! It doesn’t matter!” Yaz is crying. She doesn’t know when that happened, but it doesn’t surprise her. Seems like crying is all she’s good for these days. 

Smile evaporating, the Doctor follows the descent of a tear from the corner of Yaz’s eye to her chin. “Well,” she mutters. “You know I’ve never been able to say no to you, Yaz. For better or for worse.”

Sniffling, Yaz searches the Doctor’s face. “You mean…”

“I mean, I’ll run by your place and grab some things. I’m not gonna stand here and let you cry. Not on my watch.” Voices outside the door prompt both of them to turn their heads. Through the small pane in the wood, Yaz can make out her mother’s profile. Her family appears to be conversing with the nurse. The Doctor squeezes Yaz’s arm and starts to back away. “Right. I’ll be back soon.”

“Don’t be too long, Doctor.”

“No chance,” she winks. “I reckon we’ve both been waiting long enough.”

* * *

Seeing her family is hard. It’s one of the hardest things Yaz has ever had to do, because she knows what they don’t: this is the last time. 

Still, her parents fuss over her like it’ll make a difference and her sister looks so relieved that Yaz’s chest physically aches. She knows she’s taking something from them by leaving. She’s taking days they could have had together; time they would have come to cherish when this is all over. And it’s selfish. It’s so, repulsively selfish of her. 

But, in the end, they’re Yaz’s days. It’s Yaz’s life. She doesn’t want it to end in a city she’d outgrown by the time she was sixteen, in a bedroom whose walls only cage her in; under a sky so unremarkable she often wishes it would just fragment and fall and impale her with a solid shard of cloud. She adores her family, but they’ve had over two decades with her. Why taint their future nostalgia with the memory of Yaz growing weaker and sicker and retching a greenhouse up onto the floor of their apartment? 

She’ll write them a letter, and she’ll leave it in the TARDIS where it’ll be found after she’s gone. The same goes for Ryan and Graham. They come in to see her, and their elation at her wellbeing is just as hard to stomach as her family’s. Yaz has never known pain like this — not even when she was choking to death and bleeding out in a filthy alleyway by herself. 

The Doctor was right; goodbyes are always sad. 

But it’s worse to be the only one aware that it’s even a goodbye. It’s worse to have to hide her heartache. As it is, she’s been doing that for a long, long time. It’s second nature, by now. 

When visiting hours draw to an end, Ryan and Graham leave with promises to return the next day. Yaz tells them she’d like that. Her parents hug her — try to, anyway. It’s awkward to get their arms around her when the slightest of movements causes her so much agony. But Yaz pushes past it and encourages her parents to hug her just a little tighter and for just a little longer. She blames her tears on being woozy; on the morphine. She tells them she loves them. She watches them go. 

“Wait, Sonya,” Yaz calls, just before her sister can follow them out. 

Sonya turns in front of the doorway. “You okay, Yaz? Need me to ask the nurse to bring you some more drugs?” At that, she offers a sly grin. “Bet they’re well good, aren’t they? Yeah, they roll out the proper shit for a stab wound.”

Yaz rolls her eyes to mask how immeasurably deep Sonya’s teasing cuts. “Just come here a sec, will you?”

Sonya tucks her hands into the front of her dungarees and nears the bed. Picking up on the sobriety running a valley through Yaz’s demeanour, her brows stitch together. “What’s the matter?”

“Look, Son, we haven't always seen eye to eye — I know that. And I know I can be a pain, and I get under your skin, and you think I only annoy you for the fun of it.” Yaz clenches her jaw. “That’s not true. I’m only ever on at you ‘cause I know how much potential you’ve got. You’re so smart, Sonya.”

Sonya scoffs. “You’ve seen my grades, right?”

“You don’t have to be good at algebra and grammar to be smart. You’re witty, you’re quick, you’re kind. You hide it well, but you are. There’s a lot to be said for kindness.”

“Um. Okay?” Sonya looks deeply uncomfortable. “Where’s this coming from? I know you almost died and everything, but—“

“I did. I almost died. I came _this_ close,” says Yaz, holding her thumb and forefinger a hair’s breadth apart. “And it could happen again. In my line of work, it comes with the territory. Occupational hazard. But next time, I might not be this lucky. I might not make it. So if anything ever happens to me—“

“Oh, shut up, Yaz. Nothing’s gonna happen,” Sonya snaps. “You’re gonna be fine.”

For once in her life, Yaz wishes Sonya were right. She bites her lip and forces herself to keep it together. “No one knows what could happen tomorrow. None of us. But if, one day, I’m not around anymore, mum and dad are gonna need you. And it’ll be so hard, because you’ll need them too, but you’ll have to be selfless. You’ll have to put our family first and help them before you help yourself. You’ll have to take care of them. Pick up the slack when they let go.”

“Yaz, seriously, you better be tripping balls right now,” snipes Sonya, but there’s a fine dusting of panic behind her eyes. “What’s going on? You’re scaring the shit out of me.”

Yaz shakes her head. “Nothing, I just — I guess almost dying’s just put me in a sentimental mood.”

“Yeah, well it’s freaking me out.”

“Well, you’ll just have to suffer for one more minute, won’t you?” Yaz holds out her hand. After a lengthy delay, Sonya takes it. “You can do anything you want, Sonya. You really can, I’m not just saying that. You’ve no idea how many times I’ve witnessed, or been a part of, things I always thought were impossible. Incredible things. This world is so weird and big and unlikely. Why not make your dreams the same? What’ve you got to lose? You’ll have to actually try though. You’ll have to work harder than you’ve ever worked and you’ll have to want more than you’ve ever wanted. But you _can_ do it. I promise.”

Sonya’s eyes turn glassy. Her next words are but the smallest of whispers. “You’re not thinking of leaving us again, are you?”

“Believe me, the last thing I want to do is leave any of you behind,” vows Yaz by way of skirting around the truth. “But life’s unpredictable. You’ve gotta make the most of it. We only get so much time, at the end of the day. So don’t waste it. Don’t throw it all away.”

Sonya looks at Yaz for a long, hard moment. She squeezes her hand, and then she lets it go. “Get some sleep, Yaz. It’s been a long day.”

“Tell me you heard me.”

“I heard you. Grab life by the horns, got it.” She sweeps her gaze across Yaz’s body; fatigued as it is by both blade and bloom. “But you’ve got plenty of time to keep pestering me about it when you’re feeling better, okay? For now, just rest. You look like you need it.”

Yaz puts on an affronted air. “What you tryna say?”

“Mate, there’s a reason they’ve not left any mirrors out. If you could see yourself right now, your heart’d probably give out again.”

“You say the sweetest things.”

“Least I’m honest.” Sonya shoves her hands into her pockets and returns Yaz’s smile with a fleeting one of her own. “See you tomorrow, no mark.”

Just when Yaz thinks her heart can’t be broken into pieces any smaller, the final five words Sonya will ever utter to her pulverise it into fine dust. She coughs it out into the crook of her arm. At least it isn’t a petal. 

“Later, weirdo.”

* * *

Yaz’s room is bathed in the translucent shadows of near-dusk by the time the Doctor returns. The sky outside is orange and black. Yaz is marvelling at how strange it is to know she’ll never set eyes on it again when, all at once, every sheet of loose paper in the room is picked up and hurled around on an invisible current and both her bed and all the surrounding equipment begins to tremble.

With a cacophonous groan too loud and too alien to go unnoticed, the TARDIS phases into view beside Yaz’s cot. The door swings open and out steps the Doctor, arms spread and a maniacal grin glued to her face.

“Yasmin Khan, I’m breakin’ you out of this joint!” she announces, like she’s been waiting her whole life to say it. 

“Keep it down!” Yaz hisses, but the curl of her lips betrays her glee. The Doctor showed up. Came back. There’s no reason she shouldn’t have, but that didn’t stop Yaz from worrying that she might change her mind or run into trouble on the short hop from the hospital to her flat. Certainties don’t exist around the Doctor, and promises are fickle. 

Presently, the Doctor steps out of the TARDIS, only to immediately bang her foot on the leg of a metal trolley. She yelps, hopping on one foot and clutching the other. “When did that trolley get there?”

Yaz raises her eyebrows. “Y’know, for a prison break, this isn’t very sneaky.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry,” the Doctor apologises in a stage whisper, dropping her foot and screwing her face up into a comedic cringe that only endears Yaz further. “Right, c’mon then! From one sick bed to another.” Hurried but careful, the Doctor proceeds to detach various needles and tubes from Yaz’s body. When she’s totallly wireless, the Doctor puts an arm around Yaz and helps her to her feet, pupils constantly flitting towards her face in a show of blatant worry. “You okay to walk?”

“My legs are fine, Doctor.” 

“You’re still strainin’ the injury when you move,” the Doctor argues. The crimp between her brows deepens when, upon stepping across the threshold of the TARDIS, Yaz fails to mask a wince. “All right, that’s enough. Hold on to me.”

“What do you — Doctor!” Without warning, the Doctor sweeps Yaz off her feet, scooping her up with an arm under her legs and one at her back. Yaz winds her arms around her shoulders and chases her breath, which runs away from her whenever she and the Doctor are so torturously close. 

Her breath runs a little further when the Doctor looks down at her and winks. She hooks her foot around the door and kicks it shut, and then sets off across the console room. It’s awkward for her to reach the right switches and pull the dematerialisation lever while she’s holding Yaz, but she perseveres, and she manages it, and then they’re leaving the hospital behind with a satisfying groan of the time rotor. With Yaz folded into her arms, the Doctor starts up the steps. 

“Tonight, you’re takin’ it easy,” instructs the Doctor, oblivious to the way Yaz fast becomes transfixed by the curve of her jaw and the slope of her neck. She feels solid and real and alive, and Yaz can’t help but curl her fingers into the fabric of her shirt just to feel her. To be sure she’s real. The Doctor glances at her. “I’ll have you tip top in no time, but right now I think you could do with your own bed. I left everythin’ the same for when you came back.”

Sure enough, when the Doctor manoeuvres them carefully through the doorway into Yaz’s room, she finds everything to be exactly how she left it.

On the nightstand by her double bed, which is swathed in wine-purple sheets of luxurious cotton (as well as silken blankets stolen from a 38th century queen’s laundry room), sits an alarm clock, a half-burned candle, and an open book placed face down to save the page. The room is clean, but both the desk and bookshelves are crammed with strange memorabilia from their many adventures. The lantern-esque lamplights affixed to the wall dim automatically as they approach the bed. Before the Doctor sets her down, however, Yaz notices an imprint on the mattress. Roughly the size and shape of the Doctor — like she’s been lying in her bed. Like she slumps on top of it when she misses Yaz and dreams about the day she comes back. 

Either that, or Yaz is just seeing what she wants to see.

“Here we are,” mutters the Doctor. She lies Yaz down as gently as if she might shatter otherwise. “Home away from home, eh?”

“You really never lost faith that I’d come back?” breathes Yaz. 

“You said you would,” shrugs the Doctor. She retrieves a large, menacing syringe from her coat pocket and affords Yaz a sympathetic grimace. “Now, y’were right about that miracle medicine before. Well, kind of. It’s not miraculous. It’s science. Super advanced science. Nice shot of this ought to fix your wounds up good and quick. Unfortunately, Yaz, it’s gonna hurt. Quite a bit.”

Yaz groans. “I were really hoping there’d be a pill I could swallow.”

“No such luck.” Her eyes falter over the bandaging wrapped around Yaz’s chest, which is visible enough through the paper thin gown she’s still wearing. 

_Oh._

“You’re gonna have to pop that off so I can get to the wound,” states the Doctor, and is Yaz imagining the tightness to her voice? She definitely isn’t imagining the way she won’t look her in the eye — opting instead to fiddle with the syringe. 

“Um. I — I might need a hand.”

“You…? Oh! Oh, right! ‘Course. Silly me.” The Doctor sets the syringe down on the nightstand. Then, after a few seconds of dithering as she contemplates how best to proceed, she climbs onto the mattress beside Yaz. “Okay, so, um… just grab my shoulders. There you go.”

Whilst Yaz holds onto the Doctor to keep herself semi-vertical, the Doctor reaches behind her back to work loose the knot of her gown. The Doctor’s hair is in Yaz’s face and it smells, faintly, like smoke. Yaz wonders what fires she’s been putting out. Or starting. 

“Whoever tied this knot did a bloody good job,” grumbles the Doctor. 

Yaz is very conscious of the fact that their chests are pressed flush; beating heart to beating hearts. And she knows this isn’t a hug, not really, but it kind of feels like one. And it’s kind of nice. And it’s kind of all Yaz’s bones have ached for since as long as she can remember. 

“Aha! Got it.”

Upon the loosening of the knot, the Doctor delicately pulls the sleeves from Yaz’s arms and then the gown slips from her skin, where it bunches in her lap. Like that, she’s suddenly naked. Naked and in the Doctor’s arms — though the Doctor is very much the gentleman about it.

One arm still around Yaz, she reaches blindly for a blanket and pulls it up over the lower half of Yaz’s body. Next to come off are the bandages. The Doctor doesn’t so much as make any indication that she even acknowledges the existence of Yaz’s breasts as she winds the bandaging from around her chest and lays her bare. In fact, the second the bandages come free, the Doctor eases Yaz onto her back and helps to cover her with the blanket — leaving only her injured side exposed. 

Every gentle touch might as well be another knife slipped between Yaz’s ribs. 

“Let’s have a look then, shall we?” Brows creased with concentration, the Doctor slowly peels the gauze from Yaz’s skin. It’s the first time either of them have seen it. 

It’s an ugly thing, that’s for sure. Puckered skin, red and sore around the edges, has been pulled together with surgical sutures, around which clings a little dried blood. It’s about an inch long and who knows how deep. Having come prepared, the Doctor brandishes a packet of antiseptic wipes and cleans the area; Yaz can see how hard she’s trying not to apply too much pressure. Once it’s clean, she disposes of the wipes and picks up the syringe. 

“So, when you said it’s gonna hurt,” Yaz begins, eyeing the luminous purple liquid in the syringe warily, “can you give me a number on a scale of one to ten?”

“Oh, uh. Solid five? Six? Six and a half?” At Yaz’s increasingly mortified expression, the Doctor softens and lowers the syringe. “Look, it’s just a few seconds, and then it’ll be over. Have a little faith, eh? Steadiest hands in the galaxy, right here.”

“Oh, don’t sell yourself short, Doctor. I’m sure they’re the steadiest hands in the universe, at least.” 

Amusement dances on the slight upcurve of the Doctor’s lips. “Never did pay you back for that shoulder rub, did I?”

“That’s all right. Heal me and we’ll call it square.”

“I dunno if that’s a very fair trade. It were one hell of a massage, Yaz. You oughta start chargin’ people. A hundred custard creams per head, how’s that sound?”

Yaz opens her mouth to reply, but the only sound she ends up making is a sharp cry of pain. The Doctor impresses the tip of the needle deeper and deeper into the flesh around Yaz’s scar. With her free hand, she reaches for one of Yaz’s.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Yaz hisses. Her eyes water and she bares her teeth in a pained grin, while her heart drums a rager of a solo against her ribs. 

“It’s okay, Yaz. Just squeeze my hand. You’re doin’ great.”

Yaz clamps down like a vice on the Doctor’s hand. If it hurts, the Doctor doesn’t let on, but Yaz is surprised not to crush her fingers. Seconds later, the hellacious pressure in Yaz’s side alleviates. The Doctor sets the empty syringe down.

“There. See? Piece of cake! I’d give you a sticker for bein’ so good but, seein’ as you’re naked…” The Doctor trails off and realisation strikes her like a frying pan to the face. “Oh! Naked! Clothes! I do believe I left the case I packed for you back in the console room. Want me to go and fetch it? Won’t take me long.” Making as if to get up, the Doctor is stopped by Yaz’s fingers squeezing her own a fraction tighter. Her eyes fall over their interlocked hands and she stills instantly. An expression too fleeting to pinpoint crosses her face like a passing shadow: there and then gone. She licks her dry lips. “Right. No, I don’t suppose I’d want to be alone either, after everythin’ you’ve been through. No worries, y’can just have mine.”

With that, the Doctor peels off her coat and suspenders, yanks her navy top off by the back of its collar (Yaz tries to be as gentlemanly as the Doctor when her undershirt rides up and a stretch of toned stomach is bared briefly to the world — but she’s only human), and then she gives Yaz the shirt off her back. 

Following another blushing negotiation of limbs and trunks, the Doctor manages to help Yaz into her shirt. It’s impossibly soft against her skin and it smells so much like the Doctor that Yaz becomes a little bit inebriated by it. 

“Suits you,” remarks the Doctor in earnest. 

Yaz hopes she never asks for it back. Or, at the very least, holds off for a couple of weeks. 

“Thanks, Doctor.”

“Nah, it’s just a shirt.”

“No, I mean — thanks for coming when I called. Thanks for waiting for me. God knows you didn’t have to do that.”

The Doctor studies a loose thread in the sheets. “I’d have waited a lifetime if I had to,” she confesses quietly. Then, as if she doesn’t realise the weight of her words until they land, her head snaps up and her eyes widen. “I mean, I’d do the same for any of you. It’s basically my whole thing, y’know? If you’re in trouble, I’m your man. Woman. Person. Gods, gender is such a frustrating concept.”

If Yaz’s lungs hadn’t only recently been treated, she’s positive she’d be spitting petals out like loose teeth right now. 

But if this is her last night of easy breathing, she wants to make the most of it. 

“Will you stay the night?” 

The Doctor’s respondent smile is a thing that stretches in slow motion, or it only seems that way because Yaz is committing it, frame by frame, to her memory. Her memories aren’t worth much anymore — soon, they’ll have nowhere to go except oblivion — but it’s habit by now. She can’t help it. 

“Can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be than right here with you, Yaz,” lies the Doctor. Because it has to be a lie, doesn’t it? There’s a whole universe of things she’d probably rather be doing than coddling Yaz back to health like a baby bird with a broken wing, but the Doctor is kind enough and selfless enough to pretend. For Yaz’s sake. So Yaz’ll take the pity. She’ll take any scraps and morsels and seeds the Doctor tosses her way, because that’s what the lovesick do. They settle. 

The Doctor lies on top of the sheets and Yaz lies underneath them, and the lanterns dim further still as they turn to face one another in the half-light. 

“Sorry for leaving, Doctor,” Yaz says quietly. “It was a mistake. I never should have—“

“It’s all right, Yaz. I get it. It’s hard to juggle two lives; to keep lyin’ to everyone around you about what’s really goin’ on,” the Doctor empathises. She has no idea. “I’m just happy you came back. We’re gonna do so much together, me and you. I can’t wait.”

“Yeah,” whispers Yaz. More false promises of futures that don’t exist. “Me neither.”

“You’re my best friend, y’know? Don’t tell the lads — they’ll only moan — but you are. It were just wrong here without you.” 

Yaz thinks it’s high time they change the topic of conversation. Her lungs are beginning to smart and she doesn’t want to have to drag the Doctor out and slam the door in her face again. She doesn’t want to deal with her guilt, or the sands of time slipping through her fingers. Right now, Yaz just wants to look at the Doctor and pretend that everything will be okay.

“Can you tell me a story?” she asks. “Tell me about one of your recent adventures. Something good.”

The Doctor hums. “Ooh, d’you wanna hear about how I accidentally broke forty-six laws in eight minutes on my latest trip to Atlantis 12? Pretty sure I’m the most wanted person in that whole galaxy right now. Best avoid it for a while.”

Yaz laughs. If anything, she can always count on the Doctor for a decent story. “Tell me.”

“Well, it all started when I stepped on the Mayor’s foot. Mind you, his feet weren’t attached to his body at the time, so I didn’t actually see ‘em until it were too late — ah wait, I’m gettin’ ahead of myself! Did I ever tell you about the Soleless Sons of the Cosmos? That’s S-O-L-E sole. They do love a pun, that lot. Anyway…”

Cast in a warm, storyteller’s glow, the Doctor launches into an animated retelling of events, relaying her unbelievable comedy of errors with the assistance of wild gesticulation and hilariously poor impressions. Her story takes detours and misses steps and then goes back to retrace them, and she goes off on entirely unrelated tangents and weaves several jumbled anecdotes into her tale until she’s telling not one but half a dozen. Yaz hangs from her every word. 

She wraps herself in her voice like honey and gravel and home — and she forgets. 

It’s easy to do, when the Doctor is radiating so much effortless spirit; when she’s snorting at all her own jokes and boasting about her wits and wiles and daring stunts. Yaz gets swept up in it and lets the current carry her without struggling. It takes her to a better place. It turns her away from the black, black wave. If Yaz feels its shadow tapping on her shoulder, she doesn’t look back. 

Because how can anything be wrong?

How can anything in the universe be wrong when the Doctor is laughing? 

* * *

Yaz is fortunate, for those first few days. 

Her stab wound heals nicely, leaving but a raised white scar and a phantom pain Yaz finds easy to tune out. The flowers in her lungs are growing back, but they do so slowly at first, and she’s afforded a brief respite from her terminal agony.

She tells the Doctor to take her to all the most beautiful places in the universe. The Doctor happily obliges. 

Together, they picnic on a planet of perpetual dusk, tossing cherries into one another’s mouths and coexisting with bioluminescent butterflies, majestic six-winged birds, and myriad skittish creatures which poke their heads up from the tall grass and dart between the treetops. They dance in the opulent ballroom of a grand palace, which floats above a canopy of salmon pink clouds. The Doctor wears a suit and Yaz wears a gown and they glide across polished marble, hand in hand, as an orchestra plays the breathtaking symphony of Yaz’s deathless devotion. 

Through it all, the Doctor is more present than she’s ever been. She shares meals with Yaz even when she doesn’t need to eat, she postpones repairs so that they can spend more time together, and she seeks out her company when they’re both unwinding in the TARDIS, whether to read with her in the library or walk with her through the rainforest or relax with her by the pool. Yaz thinks she’s worried she might leave again; thinks she’s doing whatever she can to prevent Yaz from getting bored of her. 

As if that was ever the issue. 

However, the more attentive the Doctor becomes, the further Yaz finds herself slipping away. Yaz wakes one morning to the tune of the Doctor knocking excitedly on her bedroom door. When she opens her eyes, her sheets are littered in golden petals and there’s blood on her pillow. Again, it’s harder to breathe. She’s forced to turn the Doctor away while she cleans up her mess and throws up as much of her gruesome garden as she can before they head out. 

After that, her sunshiney haze dissipates, and she’s flung back into the skin of somebody running on borrowed time. She disappears randomly and without warning when she and the Doctor are together, so that she can retch her guts up in private. She goes to bed early and comes down for breakfast late. She retreats inside of herself, consumed as she is by terror and shame. 

And there is a great deal of shame. 

Because, one way or another, the Doctor will learn the truth. The body Yaz leaves behind will be a crime scene, and it won’t take a fraction of the Doctor’s genius to read the clues. In death, Yaz’s sins will be exposed. Her lies. Her deceit. Her unwarranted love. 

The Doctor will think herself the murderer. Of course she will. She’ll stain her hands with Yaz’s blood and refuse to wash it off. Before a jury of stars, she’ll condemn herself. No doubt her sentence will be harsh. 

One night, Yaz is hanging out of the TARDIS’ open doors. There’s a tether tied to her waist and she’s floating above a magenta nebula of glittering stardust, which gathers in almighty plumes beyond the protective bubble encircling her. Her dark eyes are mirrors to its magnificence. Something happens inside the TARDIS. Yaz isn’t sure what, but suddenly the blue box lurches, there’s a loud crash, and the cord around Yaz’s waist snaps. Instinctively, she reaches for the door. 

The Doctor shouts at her to hold on; she’s coming; just don’t let go of the door. 

But Yaz isn’t even afraid. She looks back at the awesome spacescape and marvels at how lovely a place it would be to die. And the Doctor would never have to learn of her disease; her awful, awful affection. She’d never know that Yaz’s love for her killed her. Sure, there would still be guilt, but on a far lesser scale. A freak accident is a freak accident. What can you do? 

Yaz lets one hand slip from the wood. Five fingertips. That’s all she’s holding onto life with. One by one, the vacuum tugs her fingers loose and entices her into its hostile maw. The rough grain scratches the pads of her fingertips and she’s millimetres from release, when—

“Oh, no you don’t!” 

The Doctor’s hand shoots out and closes tight around Yaz’s wrist. She yanks her inside and they topple gracelessly onto the floor, where the Doctor lands with a wince on her back and Yaz lands on top of her. 

When her anticipation leads to nothing but another letdown, Yaz’s immense tension unspools. She was _so_ close; it could all have been over with. 

They both could have been free. 

Yaz lifts her head to find the Doctor watching her so strangely. “If I didn’t know any better, Yaz,” the Doctor mutters, “I’d say it almost looked like you were about to let go, just now.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Doctor,” dismisses Yaz. She climbs off the Doctor’s body and offers a hand to help her up. The Doctor takes it. Once she’s on her feet, they both hold on for a few seconds too long, and Yaz casts her doleful gaze back towards the cosmos. “Couldn’t let go if I wanted to.”

The Doctor grows increasingly suspicious of Yaz after that. It’s harder to shake her off and harder to hide her symptoms, especially when they intensify. Yaz’s coughing fits become brutal and violent and leave her winded on the floor, where she clutches her ribs and hacks up blood. It doesn’t end there. She can’t run far anymore, she’s always tired, her own body and the secrets it houses make her green with nausea, and _god_ , does melancholia grip her. When she’s not thinking about the Doctor, she’s thinking about death. 

“What do you think it’s like?” Yaz asks the Doctor halfway through their second, and last, week. She can count on one hand the number of days she has left. With every intake of breath, she feels the rustling of stems and the rubbing of petals against her lungs. 

The Doctor slurps the last of her strawberry milkshake up noisily through her straw, and then licks the cream moustache from her lips contentedly. “What what’s like?” 

They’re at a diner on post-terraformed Mars. Beyond the wide glass window stretches red sand and dust. A few hovercrafts occupy the car park, and a little boy in a space suit plays in the dirt. It’s a stark contrast to the 50’s interior: all red booths, chessboard floors, a jukebox by the counter, and neon signs hanging from the walls. They’re right beside the loneliest highway on Mars; this is the only pit stop for hundreds of miles. 

“Dying,” clarifies Yaz. “What d’you think it’s like?”

Nonchalant, the Doctor shrugs. “It’s like nothin’, probably. Like an eternal, dreamless sleep. Black. Empty. Void.”

Yaz furrows her brow and picks at her fries without eating any. Her appetite’s shot lately. “Pessimistic way of lookin’ at things. I mean, doesn’t that sound lonely?”

“Loneliness is for the livin’, Yaz,” murmurs the Doctor. The distant fog in her eyes clears in the blink of an eye. When she leans back, the red vinyl creaks. “‘Course, everyone’s entitled to their own beliefs. You might think there’s more to it, and who’s to say you’re wrong?”

“Don’t you like to imagine that the people you’ve lost are in a better place? Or that they’re still with you?”

The Doctor chews on Yaz’s words for a beat. “They are with me. All of ‘em. But they aren’t ghosts or spirits or what have you — they’re just memories. They’re the time we spent together, and they’re the journey we shared, and they’re all the ways in which I’ve changed for havin’ known ‘em.” She tilts her head. “Where’s this comin’ from, anyway?”

Yaz ignores the question. “If someone dies, where do you think all their love goes? All that love they have for other people. What happens to it?”

“Blimey, you’re pullin’ out all the hard hitters today,” quips the Doctor. She scratches her temple, and then folds her arms on top of the table. “I think, as long as a person loves loud enough, as long as the people in their life knew the extent of their love, then it can’t ever really die. It’s like energy, y’know? Can’t ever be destroyed, only turned into somethin’ new. Transferred. We pass, and then all the little bits of our hearts — heart, in your case — that we devoted to someone else find a new home inside of them. And the people we loved cherish that piece of our heart. Our love. And it abides inside of them.”

“But what if they kept their love secret?” Yaz strains to say. Her mouth tastes like soil. “What then?”

From opposite sides of the table, Yaz and the Doctor study one another. A slow, vintage song pours out of the jukebox and its timeless sentiments about romance get caught in the tangled web of lies between them. The Doctor looks caught and Yaz feels seen. 

The Doctor taps her index finger against the side of her milkshake glass. “Is there somethin’ you’re tryna say, Yaz?”

Under the table, Yaz’s leg bounces and she fidgets anxiously with the hem of her leather jacket. “What d’you mean?”

“All this talk about death and love, it’s not exactly typical for us.” The Doctor’s leg shifts; she nudges her boot against the one Yaz is tapping rapidly against the floor. Yaz’s nervous tension, she’s sure, is miasmic. “Something’s been on your mind for a while. I might be daft and a little bit loopy, but I’m not entirely oblivious. I can see that something’s eatin’ at you. You’re actin’ the same way you did right before you left last time. You’re distant. You’re down. You keep runnin’ off and clammin’ up all the time. I think it’s about time we talk about it, don’t you?”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

The Doctor grinds her jaw. “I’m tryna be patient, Yaz. I really am. But you worry me. You _scare_ me. One minute you’re fine and you’re happy and you’re here with me, and then you just go somewhere. Mentally. Physically.” She rakes her eyes over Yaz and shakes her head slowly. “And now you’re sittin’ here asking me what it’s like to die. Why?”

Yaz averts her eyes. “Dunno what you—“

“Oh, just tell me what it is, Yaz!” The Doctor doesn’t acknowledge the nearby patrons who turn their heads at her raised voice. “Tell me, so we can fix it! I’m not gonna sit here and watch you slip away from me again. I can't do that; I can’t lose you for good! I refuse. Do you understand? I _refuse._ ”

In the wake of her outburst, Yaz stares, slack-jawed, at the Doctor. She’s not the only one. For the first time, the Doctor notices the attention she’s called to herself. She clears her throat and settles back, but she isn’t the one to apologise. 

“I’m sorry, Doctor,” Yaz mumbles.

The Doctor’s eyes cut sharply towards her. “Sorry for what?”

“I —“ An agitation in Yaz’s lungs cuts her off. Her face falls and the Doctor narrows her eyes, watching her closely. Again, Yaz feels an acute discomfort stirring in her organs, and she knows this feeling well enough by now to predict what happens next. “Um. One minute.”

Yaz is out of her seat in a flash. She all but runs to the restroom, and has just about enough sense to lock the cubicle door behind her before dropping to her knees in front of the toilet and heaving up a flurry of petals and leaves. Her body practically convulses with the effort it takes to keep retching them up; her stomach is sore and her hands are shaking and this can’t be happening now. Not now. 

Then somebody’s knocking on the door. “Yaz? Yaz, what’s going on? Open the door,” urges the Doctor. She tries the handle, but it doesn’t work.

Yaz grits her bloody teeth. “I’ll be right out. Just wait outside.”

“Yaz, you need to let me in. Right now.”

“Just a minute!”

More heaving. More decapitated flowers. A stubborn head gets jammed at the back of her throat and Yaz chokes and chokes and chokes until it climbs far enough for her to reach in and yank it out. She trembles a sigh of relief, tosses it into the basin, and wipes her tears with her shoulder. 

“I’m opening the door!” announces the Doctor. Upon the familiar buzz of the sonic, Yaz spits any lingering blood into the toilet and frantically flushes it. She’s still scrambling to her feet when the Doctor pushes her way inside. 

She takes one look at the tears on Yaz’s cheeks and barrels past her to look into the toilet. But she’s too late; the evidence has been washed away.

Mostly. 

It seems Yaz missed a spot because, when the Doctor frenziedly rounds on her, her alarmed eyes fixate on Yaz’s mouth. She reaches for her lips and drags her thumb across them and Yaz doesn’t breathe once. When the Doctor pulls her hand away, there’s blood smeared on the pad of her thumb. They both stare at it. 

“Yaz…” The Doctor’s voice is low, and shaky with the magnitude of her restraint. Yaz can tell she’s warring with a thousand different emotions. “What’s happening to you?”

Divine intervention or merely perfect timing, Yaz can’t say. Either way, she’s saved from having to answer to the Doctor when the whole building begins to shake with a seismic rattle of foundations. The overhead lights flicker on and off, picture frames hanging from the walls shatter on the floor, and the Doctor wraps herself around a crouching Yaz to shield her from harm until the tremors eventually subside. 

When the calamity passes, Yaz’s head is tucked under the Doctor’s chin and they’re clinging to one another like glue. 

“Oh, what now?” grouses the Doctor. She stands upright and looks at Yaz as though she doesn’t know whether to investigate or continue her interrogation. In the end, potential immediate danger wins out. With a frustrated sigh, she helps Yaz up. “This isn’t over.”

“I know.”

The way the Doctor looks at Yaz then unsettles her. It’s like she’s angry. Furious. Except Yaz likes to believe, at this point, that she knows her a little better than that. Usually, when the Doctor gets mad, she’s really just afraid. Just as scared as everybody else, and just as unwilling to admit it. 

Spinning on her heels, the Doctor marches out of the restroom with Yaz in tow. They stop dead when they reenter the diner.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” sighs the Doctor, like it’s nothing but a minor inconvenience that the view beyond the windows has changed from the red dunes of Mars to what looks like the interior walls of a spacecraft. The rest of the civilians in the diner look understandably terrified. 

“Have we just been beamed up?” asks Yaz. 

“Looks that way.”

“The whole diner?”

“Yep.”

“Why would anybody want to abduct a diner?”

“Not a clue!” Exasperated, the Doctor throws her hands up. “But, as per usual, I guess it’s on me to figure it out. Not like I were in the middle of something!” she shouts to the ceiling, as though their captors are listening. She regards the cowering staff and patrons occupying the diner. “Right. You lot just sit down and be quiet. I dunno, have some pancakes. Choose a relaxing tune on the jukebox. Get to know each other. Just let me sort this out and I’ll have you all back home in a jiffy. And you—“ she turns to Yaz and grabs her hand— “with me. I’m not lettin’ you out of my sight.”

* * *

As it turns out, their captors are less interested in the diner than they are the Doctor. 

Yaz is hazy on a lot of the details but, from what she can gather, the Doctor made herself enemy number one to their kind when she interfered in a senseless war, which they then lost as a result. Being the vengeful type, they tracked her across time and space with the single-minded goal of making her pay. 

The diner was beamed up onto a mothership. The mothership is surrounded by a whole fleet — thousands and thousands of crafts. All here for one purpose: to witness the Doctor die. 

Run of the mill stuff, really. Nothing they’re not used to. If anything, the Doctor seems bored by it all. She toys with them. Mocks them. There are no efforts to negotiate or pacify; no attempts to reason with them or implore them to choose a better path. The Doctor is not in a forgiving mood. They interrupted her. 

Big mistake.

The Doctor gains the upper hand quickly. For a while, it looks like everything’s going to work out without much of a hitch. They reverse the polarity of the transport beam that abducted the diner so that, when they make their way back, they’ll be able to return everybody safely to Mars. They swiftly escape the cells their hostage-takers try to imprison them in. The Doctor even manages to send a message to the authorities of the local galaxy, who have been hunting this fleet for years, and make them aware of its current location. Their brand of justice is brutal. The Doctor is content to leave them to it. 

In point of fact, after disabling their engines and stranding them in deep space, she and Yaz attempt to do just that. They’re in the control room mapping a route back to the diner (it’s a huge ship; it’d take them countless hours without a map) when Yaz feels a strong, scaly arm wind around her throat and tear her from the Doctor’s side. 

“Doctor!” she cries. 

“Yaz?” The Doctor whirls around and blanches when she registers the gun pointed at Yaz’s head. Yaz twists her neck to find that she’s in the arms of the commander they thought they’d trapped in the boiler room. Clearly, they were mistaken. His forked tongue darts out to clean a yellow eye and Yaz cringes. 

“Hello, again,” he snickers. 

“Oh, mate,” the Doctor says. “You really, really don’t want to be doin’ that.”

The commander smirks. Yaz can tell because it makes a wet, stomach-churning sound in her ear. “When the Wrathborns seek revenge, Doctor, we never fail,” he hisses. 

“Neither do I,” asserts the Doctor. 

“This one is interesting.” The commander digs his claws into Yaz’s throat and she grunts. The Doctor clenches her fists at her sides. “I’ve been paying attention, you see. In the face of peril, you put yourself between the human and the danger. You would die for her, wouldn’t you?”

Yaz squirms in his hold. When she does, she can feel the hilt of his knife nudge her hip. She recalls seeing it sheathed at his belt. 

“Answer me!” roars the commander. 

The muscles in the Doctor’s cheek flex and, dark beneath the shadow of her brow, her eyes are a thousand shades of fury. “Yes,” she mutters. “But I don’t intend to die today.”

The commander’s body shakes with quiet laughter. “Maybe you don’t need to, Doctor. Maybe I’ll take this one instead.” Reflexively, the Doctor takes a step forward. The second she does, the commander cocks his gun, bringing her advance to an abrupt halt. “Ah, ah, ah. You stay right there.”

The Doctor’s gaze slides from the commander to Yaz. “Don’t worry. Nothing’s gonna happen to you, Yaz. You’re gonna be fine. Trust me. I’ve got you.”

Yaz hardly thinks it matters either way. Maybe this is better than the alternative. There’s a rustling in her lungs and a discomfort in her throat and she knows, if the commander doesn’t kill her soon, the sunflowers certainly will. She didn’t quite get her two weeks with the Doctor, but they had a good run. A good farewell. She’s thankful for that. 

“I think you’ll find it’s me that has her,” sneers the commander. “You stole our glory from us, Doctor. It’s the only thing that matters to us. It’s what we live and die for. Now I’m going to take what you would live and die for, and there’s nothing you can do.”

“Mmm, I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” says the Doctor. And then she does something that prompts goosebumps to rise across every inch of Yaz’s skin: she grins. “Go on, ask me why.”

The commander snarls. “Why?” 

“‘Cause I have an apple!” The Doctor reaches into her coat pocket and, sure enough, pulls out a bright red apple. She tosses it up into the air and catches it. “That old myth about doctors and apples doesn’t have much weight behind it, truth be told. I love a good apple. Pretty hefty, aren’t they? Pretty solid. I like that about ‘em. Comes in handy.”

“You’re stalling, Doctor. It’s no use.”

“Am I?” She shines the apple on the lapel of her coat and takes a small bite. “Mm. Tasty. Want some?” The Doctor holds it out towards him. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t react. “No? Suit yourself. Now y’see, as much as I’d like to eat this apple, it happens to be the only weapon I have on me.”

At that, the commander begins to cackle. “You’re going to kill me with an apple?”

“Nah, mate,” says the Doctor. Her forced air of cheer disintegrates in half a heartbeat and her face turns impossibly, terrifyingly cold. “I’m gonna kill your entire fleet with an apple.”

Yaz frowns. “Doctor, what’re you on about?”

“My thoughts precisely,” seconds the commander. The barrel of his gun presses harder against Yaz’s temple. “Now is not the time for jokes.”

“Who’s joking?” The Doctor tosses the apple back and forth between her hands. Yaz tries to find a sliver of warmth behind her eyes and fails. She must be bluffing. She must. “Interesting thing about all these warships — well, I say interesting, but I really mean primitive — they all come decked out with their own remote control warheads. Now, I made it impossible for anyone down there to activate theirs when I killed their engines. But the mothership, which is what we’re standin’ on, has remote access to _all_ of them. Doesn’t it?”

The commander is breathing heavily in Yaz’s ear. Yaz chokes on a series of coughs which go unnoticed amidst the stifling tension taking up residence in the room.

The Doctor quirks a brow. “Now I’ve got your attention, eh? I bet you’re thinkin’ to yourself, ‘but there’s no way she can access all those warheads and detonate them before I pull the trigger’. Which might’ve been the case, before I broke onto your virtual command centre, hacked through your lousy defence system, and rewired every single warhead activation trigger to respond to one single command. The press of a button. The press of a big, fat, red, irresistible button. And would you look at that?” The Doctor points at the wall. Equidistant from both herself and the commander, there’s a button. Big and red and irresistible. “Probably wouldn’t be able to get to it in time to keep you from turnin’ that gun on both of us, of course. But that’s what the apple’s for. Have I mentioned that I have really good aim? Ask Yaz. I’m always thrashin’ her at darts.”

“Doctor, have you lost your mind?” shouts Yaz. “There’s thousands of ships out there! And there are people on all of them!”

“Savages.”

“ _People_!”

“Listen to your friend, Doctor,” urges the commander. He sounds worried. “You wouldn’t eradicate the last of a dying species for some girl. Some human.”

“She’s not just some human,” glowers the Doctor. “That’s Yasmin Khan you’re pointin’ your gun at, and I would burn all three-hundred-and-sixty-seven thousand of you to keep her heart beating. You know what I’m capable of. You’ve studied me, you’ve watched me; you’ve brushed up on my history. Do you really think I wouldn’t do it? Are you willing to take that chance?”

Yaz gasps for breath. The flowers climbing her throat are helped none by the commander sinking his claws in. “Doctor,” wheezes Yaz. “Don’t do this. Don’t kill them. Not in my name. I don’t want that!”

The Doctor won’t look her in the eye; merely continues to stare off with the commander. “Let her go.”

Yaz has never, ever seen the Doctor like this. 

On one hand, she’s petrified of the woman standing in front of her — the woman who went, in a matter of hours, from slurping sugary milkshakes and musing about love in a Martian diner, to threatening genocide with all the alarming conviction of somebody who has danced this dance before. 

On the other hand, Yaz has to wonder why. Why did she flick that switch? What would make somebody as steadfast in their morals as the Doctor abandon them so recklessly? 

Yaz remembers that she once remarked at how she would willingly surrender every single one of her principles for the Doctor, but that’s because Yaz is in love with her. The Doctor isn’t in love with Yaz. Can’t be. Yaz would have known, or the Doctor would have said something. She’d have said something to keep Yaz from leaving the TARDIS, or she’d have said something when she got stabbed, or she’d have said something when she came back to her and they spent all that time together, dancing and laughing and existing side by side. 

Besides, this doesn’t look like love. This looks like wrath. It doesn’t look like love; it looks like possession. It doesn’t look like love; it looks like hatred. 

It doesn’t look like love.

Does it?

_No._

And Yaz isn’t about to watch the Doctor make a martyr of the code she lives by in the name of a dead woman. It’s time, anyway. The sands have run out. The clock has stopped ticking. Yaz is coughing. 

It starts like it always does. A couple of dry coughs. An itch she can’t reach. A flutter in her lungs. “Doctor, listen to me,” croaks Yaz. Another cough. “I’m sorry — I’m really, really sorry — but I can't let you do this. It’s not worth it. _I’m_ not worth it. It’s too late for me, but it isn’t too late for you. You haven’t hit that button yet. And you don’t need to.”

The Doctor frowns at her. True panic doesn’t set in until, following another round of rib-toughening coughs, Yaz pulls her hand from her mouth to reveal a few specks of blood staining her chin. The Doctor’s callous facade crumbles. “Yaz—“

“No. It’s okay. Let him have me. Please just let him have me,” entreats Yaz. She can feel the petals, now; feel that whole sunflower field she swallowed in her nightmares threatening to climb back out of her one by one. Her eyes blur with tears. “I didn’t want you to find out like this. I didn’t want you to find out at all, but…”

“What’s wrong with the human?” the commander growls when Yaz is seized by another, more severe episode. 

“Yaz?” The Doctor’s lower lip quivers. “Yaz, what’s goin’ on?”

“I’m _dying,_ Doctor,” Yaz sobs. The words are an enormous relief to finally speak out loud. “I think… I think I might be dying right now.” When Yaz submits to a paroxysmal choking fit, the commander shoves her to the ground in disgust but keeps his weapon trained squarely on her head. Yaz hardly registers a thing. The next time she heaves, she brings up a handful of petals in one go. 

Soaked in blood, they splatter to the floor. 

They spell out her secrets and all of her sins. 

The Doctor’s next breath comes out broken and wrong. She’s looking at the petals like they have to be something else; like her eyes have to be deceiving her. But she keeps looking, and they don’t stop being what they are, which leaves only one sane conclusion. 

“Are those…” 

“Petals,” finishes Yaz. Clutching her side, she forces herself to sit back until she’s kneeling beside the commander. “They’re petals. Sunflowers, if you were wondering. I think that’s pretty fitting, don’t you?”

The Doctor opens and closes her mouth, struggling for something to say. Yaz can’t blame her. It’s a lot. It’s really quite a lot. She knows this better than anybody. But it’s okay, she thinks, because this is all moments from being over — and then she won’t have to suffer anymore. 

Just like that, the Doctor’s previous ideas about death don’t seem so daunting. In fact, eternal nothing sounds kind of peaceful. It sounds like the rest Yaz needs. Because she’s tired now. She’s tired of getting hurt and she’s tired of hurting everybody else. Most of all, she’s tired of making the Doctor cry. But she is. She’s crying, and all Yaz wants is to make it stop. 

“Who are they fitting for, Yaz?” the Doctor whispers. Her every word is so fragile. “Tell me. Tell me who the flowers are for.”

“Enough of this!” screeches the commander. He lifts his gun and the Doctor lifts her apple and Yaz sees this coming. She won’t let it happen. Her final act before she dies will be to protect the Doctor from herself. If it’s the last thing she ever does, she will save the Doctor's soul. 

Surging to her feet, though her pain is blinding, Yaz yanks the commander’s knife from his belt and brings the hilt down so hard against his skull that he’s knocked unconscious before he hits the floor. His gun never goes off. The apple never leaves the Doctor‘s hand. Three-hundred-and-sixty-seven-thousand lives are spared. Weighed up against the single heart that’s about to give out, Yaz thinks that’s a pretty nice result. Numbers to be proud of. No monsters will be made here today. 

The knife falls from Yaz’s hand and clatters on the floor. She’s next. Slumping to her knees, she chokes up another series of petals and blooms. It’s getting harder to breathe. Her lungs are over capacity. That black wave is crashing down around her. 

She’s sorry the Doctor has to witness this.

Exhaustion kicks in and Yaz, dizzy and nauseous and ready to go, topples onto her side. The Doctor’s hands slip under her head before it can hit the ground. Kneeling over her, the Doctor cradles her face; one of her tears lands warm on Yaz’s cheek. 

“The flowers, Yaz, who are they for?” 

“We had a good run, Doctor, didn’t we? I had… I had the best time with you,” sputters Yaz. “And I was okay being your best friend. Really. It was the best thing I ever did.”

“Tell me! Just say it!” The Doctor shakes Yaz desperately to keep her eyes from closing. “Don’t give up. Just tell me!”

Weak, Yaz lifts a hand to the Doctor’s cheek. Wipes her tears. _That’s better._ “I don’t want my love to die when I do, Doctor. Take a piece of my heart with you when I go. In fact, take all of it. ‘Cause it’s yours anyway.” Yaz turns her head to spit up another petal. Her breathing comes out in short, painful gasps. A selfish part of her is glad not to be alone at the end. Glad the Doctor will hold her through it. “I love you, Doctor. Always have. Always will. I’m sorry.”

The Doctor chokes a heartbroken, weepy laugh. “Yaz, you’re not dying. You’re not. Ask me why, go on.”

Yaz’s lips are turning blue. “Why?”

“Because I love you, too. I _love_ you, Yaz!” cries the Doctor. She presses her forehead to Yaz’s. “Always have. Always will.”

“No you don’t,” coughs Yaz. “You’ll… you’ll say anything to save me. But it’s not your fault. I don’t blame you.”

“Yaz, you have to believe me. I’m not lying. I promise I’m not,” the Doctor swears, and she looks sick with fear. Yaz’s eyelids are growing heavy. The Doctor doesn’t love her. “Yaz? Yaz! Don’t fall asleep. Don’t you hear me? I love you! Don’t fall asleep. Please. Please!”

“Let me go,” croaks Yaz.

“Never.”

Then the Doctor kisses Yaz. Urgently, she crashes her soft, smooth lips to Yaz’s cold, bloody ones. The kiss tastes like iron and salt, grief and rebirth, earth and stars. 

It really is a valiant effort. 

But the Doctor doesn’t love her. 

Maybe the Doctor reads her mind, because then she’s making a frustrated sound against Yaz’s mouth, and her thumbs are at Yaz’s temples, and something is pushing into her mind with overwhelming presence. It’s a memory. 

And it goes like this. 

* * *

_By the time the Doctor has finished recounting her wild, mostly-true retelling of the unfortunate series of events which took place on Atlantis 12, Yaz is asleep. Lying on her side, the Doctor permits herself a few minutes to drink her in. To appreciate the heartbeat jumping at her throat, the dreaming flutter of her eyelids (she hopes she’s having good dreams), and the steady rise and fall of her chest. All sure signs of life._

_Yasmin Khan is alive._

_The Doctor breathes a sigh of relief she’s been holding onto for a week. For months, even. Not only is she alive, but she’s right back where she belongs, and that’s with the Doctor. She should have fought harder for her last time; should have fought to keep her safe._

_But she’s here now. That’s what matters. She’s here, and she’s under the Doctor’s care, and the Doctor will be damned if she’s going to allow harm to befall a single hair on her head._

_Gentle as can be, she lifts one of Yaz’s wrists and presses her fingers to her pulse. It’s strong. Yaz has always been strong._

_She’s so many things._

_She’s smart, capable, stubborn, brave, kind, selfless. Beautiful. Yaz is so beautiful. She’s beautiful when she’s charging headfirst into danger with the Doctor’s hand in hers, and she’s beautiful here, now, while she snoozes softly in the warm glow of the lanterns wearing the Doctor’s shirt. The idea that Yaz will wake up smelling like the Doctor does something lovely and painful to her chest._

_But that’s not allowed, is it?_

_Looking at Yaz the way she’s looking at her right now isn’t allowed. Yaz doesn’t want that. The Doctor is sure that’s why she ran away last time, because she looked at her and she saw the tragic truth of her desire written all over her adoring face, and it scared her._

_It tears the Doctor apart. She has Yaz, but not really. They’re together again, but not in the way she’d die for._

_Nevertheless, if Yaz is happy, she’ll try to be happy, too. It’s no use trying to stop feeling the way she does, because Yaz long ago got her hands on the Doctor’s hearts. Even when they’re apart, those handprints branded upon her soft, red tissue sear like twin flames, and the Doctor smells her pitiful hearts sizzling in the undying heat of them. So no, she can’t turn it off. She can’t turn away. But she can keep it quiet. In times such as this, the Doctor can confess it to the room, where it will go unheard by the gently dreaming and hurt just the one of them._

_The Doctor strokes Yaz’s cheek and leans in. Lips grazing the shell of her ear, she whispers what she wants to scream._

_The words soak into Yaz’s skin._

_She smiles without waking: tender, sleepy, gutting._

_Come morning, the Doctor is still picking shattered fragments of herself up off the floor._

* * *

Light and colour and sound all merge together into one endless stream, which slips over Yaz like a rushing river slides over a boulder. She tries to hold onto things as they pass her by, but she might as well be reaching with the hands of a ghost. 

Yaz glimpses a head of blonde hair, anxious amber eyes; a glowing neon sign; black and white tiles; red sand; a blue door. 

She’s floating.

That great and final wave, she supposes, is carrying her body out to the place where sky meets horizon. The edge of the world. The end of the world. What awaits her over that plunge, she can’t say, but the journey is confusing. Is this her life unfolding in blurry snapshots before her eyes, or is this her spirit finding its way? 

Neither, as it turns out. She doesn’t know how long it takes her to wash up on the shore, but when she does, it isn’t an eternal nothing she wakes to find. 

It’s an infirmary. 

Not like the ones back home. No, this one has more of a wartime feel to it. The walls are tiled dark green and the high ceilings arc impressively overhead. It’s a long room with at least a dozen empty cots lined against the walls, each beside their own nightstand and shaded lamp. Only Yaz’s is switched on. Beneath a cone of orange light, she lifts her hands to her groggy eyes and rubs them with her palms.

She takes a breath.

Wait.

She takes another breath. She’s breathing. No flowers in her lungs; no petals in her mouth. Do ghosts breathe? Is it just a habit? What kind of afterlife is this anyway?

A quiet sigh to her left makes her jump. She turns her head. There, slumped in an armchair right beside her cot, is the Doctor. Her eyes are closed and the muscles in her face are twitching like she’s having a bad dream. And then Yaz remembers. 

She can’t be dead.

She can’t be dead, because the Doctor loves her. 

The Doctor’s body tenses and she gasps herself awake. For a moment, she looks perplexed and out of place. She looks like a lost child. But then she blinks, and she sits up, and her eyes find Yaz’s. The nightmare ends there. 

“Yaz!” She’s on her feet in an instant. “Yaz, hey. How are you feelin’?”

“I—“ Yaz’s voice is hoarse. She can still taste blood; can still feel it caking her throat. When she looks down at herself, she finds she’s still in the filthy clothes she almost died in. 

“Sorry, sorry. I were gonna wash you up and everythin’ but I didn’t wanna risk wakin’ you. You’ve been sleepin’ all day.” The Doctor is fidgeting with her hands like she doesn’t know where to put them. “You’re okay though, right? You should be okay. I ran about a thousand different tests. Not an exaggeration. The flowers are gone, Yaz. They’re all gone.”

“Doctor,” Yaz wheezes. Her fingers lift from the sheets and the Doctor reaches for them. 

“Yeah?”

“Please get me out of these clothes,” she pleads. The reek of blood is making her nauseous and she feels the dirty fabric clinging to her skin like grime. She’s suffocating in them. “Please.”

Sympathy presses the Doctor’s lips together. “Of course. Come on, let’s get you cleaned up, eh?”

The Doctor leads Yaz out of the TARDIS’ infirmary and into one of its many bathrooms. She might be cured of her disease, but it leaves an awful fatigue in its wake. Yaz undresses slowly while the Doctor, with her back to her, runs her a warm bubble bath. 

Neither of them say anything. Only Yaz’s shallow breathing, and the sound the water makes when it trickles from Yaz’s body where the Doctor washes her, fills the freighted silence between them. The water smells like buttercream and Yaz is so thankful the Doctor didn’t opt for anything floral. She lets the sweet sugariness of it cleanse her. Sugar always makes her think of the Doctor. 

Knees pulled up to her chest, Yaz drops her forehead against them as the Doctor works the soap into a lather at her back. She trembles a sigh. Lightly, the Doctor gives her a reassuring squeeze on her shoulder.

Once she’s towelled off and scrubbed her teeth and tongue raw with a toothbrush, Yaz changes into a soft, oversized jumper and a pair of plaid pyjama shorts, and lets the Doctor guide her towards her favourite lounge. The walls are all dark wood, there are bookshelves with ancient but well-kept first editions lining the shelves, and a warm fire is always burning in front of the camelback sofa. 

The Doctor sits her down and drapes a shawl over her lap. She leaves the room, but not for long. When she returns, there are two warm mugs of hot chocolate in her hands — topped with whipped cream, marshmallows, chocolate sprinkles, and a Flake. Yaz accepts hers with a faint smile whilst the Doctor settles in beside her. 

“Feelin’ better?” asks the Doctor. She scoops a marshmallow up onto her tongue and chews it. 

“Much,” says Yaz. She runs her thumb along the handle of her mug and nibbles anxiously on the inside of her lip. “Feels weird, to be sitting here right now. I thought… I mean, I didn’t think…”

“You didn’t think you were gonna make it,” surmises the Doctor. 

Yaz shakes her head, staring at her mountain of whipped cream and watching her Flake slowly sink into it. 

The Doctor sets her own mug down on the coffee table and turns so that she’s facing Yaz. She’s been patient so far, but they both know it’s time they finally talked about it. “Yaz, you must have been aware that you were dyin’ for months. Constantly sufferin’, week after week after week, all on your own…” Her voice begins to take on the strain of somebody holding back tears. “You’ve gotta help me understand, here, because I’m at a loss. Why on _Earth_ wouldn’t you say anythin’ to me? Why wouldn’t you tell me? I could’ve put an end to all of this in a second.”

Yaz’s Flake disappears completely. She puts her mug down next to the Doctor’s, and finally braves her face. Her intense eyes are magmatic in the firelight. “Can I ask you something, Doctor? Can I ask you to just imagine, for one second, that you’re me? You’re a nobody kid from Sheffield doing nothing with your nobody life—“

“Yaz…”

“No, listen. So you’re a nobody, right? And then one day, by some bizarre, astronomically unlikely stroke of luck, an alien falls out of the sky and lands in your life. And she’s brilliant, this alien. She’s dynamite. She’s fearless. She’s bloody untouchable. For some reason, she lets you tag along with her while she saves the world. Over and over again. She gives you a glimpse of the universe, and it’s always so incredible, but it never even holds a candle to her. Not the way she comes running when somebody calls for help, not the way she grins at you when you say the right thing; not even the way she can scarf down an entire packet of biscuits in thirty seconds flat.”

“Twenty-six,” the Doctor corrects under her breath. 

Yaz rolls her eyes. “Point is, Doctor, how is that boring human from South Yorkshire supposed to believe that someone like that — someone who embodies every wonder of the whole bloody universe just by existing — could ever look at them with anything even remotely resembling love? It doesn’t compute. It makes no sense!”

The Doctor considers Yaz’s point with downturned lips. “Okay, Yaz. I want _you_ to imagine somethin’ for me. I want you to imagine you’ve just lost every single thing, every last person, that matters to you. I want you to imagine that, just when you were happy to finally get some rest and leave the universe to its own devices for once, you’re reborn. And you fall. And you crash onto this little world you’ve been saving since it first began, and then it asks you to save it again. You don’t get to take a breath, you don’t get to mourn, because you have to be the Doctor — even though that’s the last thing you wanna be right now.

When you get to your feet, you find yourself on a train with a few ordinary people from Sheffield. Except they’re not ordinary. Not even a little bit. There’s a woman on this train who’s never dealt with anythin’ like this in her entire life, and she’s not backin’ down for a second, because there are people who need her help. And that fierce determination in her eyes reminds you of why you keep fightin’. It’s for people like her. People with hearts so big they overshadow even their fear. So you grab her and you run with her and she follows you into the terrifyin’ unknown time and time again. 

This copper from Sheffield, by all accounts, should be scared to death of you. You kidnap her, you fling her into danger; you turn everythin’ she think she knows on its head with a snap of your fingers. But d’you know what she does instead of run and hide? She trusts you. Gods, Yaz, she asks for more. More of the universe. More of you. 

She’s a friend when you thought you’d never have another. She’s your common sense when you’re forgettin’ to sleep and eat and breathe. She’s the hand you reach for when you’re too stubborn to admit how afraid you are. She’s not just a human — she’s what it _means_ to be human.

Now tell me, Yaz, how could you not fall totally, madly in love with her?”

Speechless, Yaz stares at the Doctor. The fire crackles and spits. A veneer of tears coats her eyes and makes a blurry portrait of the Doctor’s earnest features, until she wipes them on the sleeve of her sweater and swallows with a quivering jaw. 

“So why didn’t you ever tell me?” she whispers. “Why did you wait until I was dying? Would you ever even have told me otherwise?”

The Doctor casts her eyes down. “I thought you knew already. When you left… Yaz, I thought you were scared of the way I felt about you. That you saw how huge and overwhelming it all was and so you packed your things and ran as far away from me as possible.”

“I… God.” Yaz lowers her head and pinches the bridge of her nose. Oh, the ways they hurt each other in the name of love. “It killed me to leave. I mean, really, it almost did. I could never be scared of you, Doctor. I hope you know that.”

“Really? Looked pretty scared of me up there on that mothership,” the Doctor mutters. Her shame is palpable. 

Yaz pauses. She’d almost forgotten: the Doctor’s calm rage, her sinister sneer, the premeditation it took to have that fallback in place. “Would you really have done it? Would you really have killed all those people?”

“I don’t know,” answers the Doctor. “I really don’t. I wish I could say no. I want more than anythin’ to be able to say no, but I don’t wanna lie to you anymore. I can't stand another lie. Even if that means… even if it mean this is all over before it begins.”

Yaz remembers the allusion the Doctor made to the commander about her dark past; to choices she made before they knew each other. It settled uneasy in her stomach then and it comes back up to haunt her now. “Have you ever done anything like that before?” 

The Doctor’s silence speaks ten thousand things. It speaks a dusty volume of harrowing history that Yaz has not yet cracked the spine of. 

“Oh.”

“Are you frightened of me?” the Doctor asks in a voice so small it almost doesn’t make it across the short distance between them. 

“I think I would be if you were still that person. If you were alone.” Yaz peels the shawl from her lap and shuffles closer to the Doctor. She takes her hands and holds on tight. “But you’re not alone, Doctor. You don’t ever have to be alone again for as long as I’m alive. I think I’ve proved by now that I’m gonna love you ‘til the last breath I take, but that doesn’t mean anything if I don’t love all of you. Who you are, who you’ve been, who you could become. There’s so much I don’t know, but I _want_ to. I wanna learn it all. So let me see you.”

“Yaz…” The Doctor lifts her palm to Yaz’s neck and strokes her thumb along her jaw. “There’s no guarantee you’ll wanna stay if I give you what you want.”

“No, there aren’t any guarantees, Doctor. Not in life. Not in love. I’ve had to learn that the ugly way.” She squeezes the Doctor’s hand. “But there’s trust. There’s always trust. I think it’s about time we start puttin’ a little more in each other, don’t you?”

The Doctor’s smile is watery and relieved. The Doctor’s smile is true. “I really do love you, Yasmin Khan.”

Yaz grins through her own joyful tears. “So kiss me about it, will you?”

“Oh, I thought you’d never ask.”

In an eager collision, their mouths meet for the second time, but it might as well be the hundredth. Yaz divines a familial comfort in the firm press of the Doctor’s cool lips, and finds warmth unknown in the gasping breath that passes from one to another. Kissing the Doctor is like returning to a childhood home she knows the bones of like the back of her hand and, paradoxically, like stepping into the blazing sun of a brand new world about which she knows nothing but its name. 

Yaz’s slow unravelling of the Doctor’s complex identity begins with the exploration of her body. She learns of the impossible softness of her hair between her fingers and discovers the way her breath hitches when Yaz’s teeth graze the lobe of her ear. Her hands chart an all-encompassing route across the Doctor’s expanse of pale skin, noting every groove of her ribs, every curve of her hips; every peak and valley and all the ways she can use them to manipulate soft moans and heavenly groans from the back of the Doctor’s throat. In the thrall of ecstasy, the Doctor transcends her body and comes, invited, into Yaz’s.

And when the Doctor, curious adventurer that she is, seeks to unfurl the map of Yaz’s body in kind, Yaz finds that she has never known such devastating heights. She learns a lot about the way the Doctor loves in the way the Doctor touches her. She’s tender and she’s patient, she takes her time; she cherishes. 

The Doctor shows Yaz stars and galaxies she’s never even dreamed of; the kind that exist only in a universe of two — and this universe isn’t born of science, but carefully crafted by doting hands, and tended to with heart. 

Yaz is still adrift in their brand new nebula some time later. She and the Doctor swap the lounge and the hearth for the open doors of the TARDIS, with a blanket draped over their shoulders and a steaming cup of tea each. They’re looking out over the Milky Way. Earth and all her neighbours are but marbles in the black, but it doesn’t make Yaz feel small to see her home from such great distance. On the contrary, she feels larger than life itself to be looking out over everything in the Doctor’s easy company. 

“So,” begins Yaz, resting her head on the Doctor’s shoulder, “I believe you’ve got a story to tell me.”

The Doctor winds her arm around Yaz’s waist and presses her lips to the top of her head. “I must warn you, it’s a long’un. And it’s not always pretty. Sometimes it’s sad, sometimes it’s dark; sometimes it feels like it’s never gonna end.”

“Do you want it to end?”

“I’d take a million more pages if you were on every single one of ‘em, Yaz.”

Yaz looks up and the Doctor looks down, and they smile into a brief kiss. When Yaz is settled comfortably against her once more, the Doctor takes a deep breath and gazes out at infinity. “I’m not sure where to start.”

Seeking out one of the Doctor’s hands, between the knuckles of which her love first bloomed so long ago, Yaz brings it to her lips and then doesn't let it go. 

“Just start with something good,” she says, “and we’ll take the rest from there.”


End file.
